My Ikea obsession led me to a super-fan's paradise in rural Sweden
Ikea's unyielding sameness is a stabilizing force in my life — but I wanted novelty anyway, at any cost. So I traveled thousands of miles to the Ikea Museum.
Lövet hovered in a shaft of light. The leaf-shaped accent table, one of Ikea's first flat-packed furnishings, was frozen in its ascent to heaven, having shed its earthly cardboard-and-twine packaging. All that was missing from the display was a button to play a choir of angels.
It was 2013, and I hadn't traveled from Washington, — for subtlety. I was here to see the Ikea Museum, which at the time was in the basement of the Ikea Hotell. While small in size and scope, the collection was so shameless in its boosterism that it concluded with a depiction of an Ikea store on the moon.
