My IKEA fantasy

IKEA is one of the only stores that I can, and do, happily spend an entire day in. It's designed to encourage that, of course, with the restaurant and the kids' area and acres of showrooms to browse through. And while I might love organizing things a little more than the average person, IKEA's appeal is well-known and wide-ranging.

In 1917, John Cotton Dana asked rhetorically, "Is the department store a museum?" His answer was that it is not a good museum - but that museums aren't good museums either, and that department stores get right a lot of the things that museums fall short at. Department stores are easy to access, open at convenient times for visitors, well-advertised, free with information and assistance, and, significantly, showcase things that are interesting and relevant to its visitors.

Dana was trying to make the point that museums were institutions in service to the public, and needed to start acting like it. Almost a hundred years later, museums have caught on to that, although the extent to which they've really put that into practice is still a little varied. But I think his point about department stores remains thought-provoking.

Especially when you replace "department stores" with "IKEA." IKEA, like any other massive retail business, does all the things Dana pointed out - but it makes a point of going beyond that. There's a restaurant, and it's not only good but affordable, which isn't something most museum restaurants can claim. There's a place to deposit your bored or tired kids where they'll be able to amuse themselves and stay out of trouble. Obviously, there's a reason that IKEA can offer these things and museums can't (money). But in my fantasy museum, there'd be a cheap, good restaurant (possibly serving Swedish meatballs) and a Småland.

IKEA also likes to highlight its community involvement. Yes, some of their concern with environmental responsibility is probably a marketing stunt, but museums could benefit from making an effort to go green, too (again, I think money is unfortunately standing in the way of that). And IKEA also has connections to its local community - on one visit, I saw a Tae Kwon Do group giving a demonstration near the restaurant. Those sort of relationships are something museums do, and do well.

But what excites me most about my IKEA/generic museum comparison is the objects (of course - I love things). Naturally, IKEA is the antithesis of a museum whose collection is made up of authentic objects. At IKEA, you touch things, sit in chairs, open drawers, look in cupboards (at the explicit urging of stickers telling you to - which kind of reminds me of those museum exhibits with the "What's this object? Lift the flap for the answer!" displays). The whole point is to interact physically with the objects in the showrooms, to decide if they're right for you, to be convinced that you need this desk or that chest of drawers in your own home. Those rooms are set up, complete with props, to encourage you to insert yourself into those appealing spaces.

The meandering floorplan and showrooms IKEA uses are a format that works well in museums with furniture collections - for example, the DeWitt Wallace Museum in Williamsburg - but there any similarity stops abruptly. You are absolutely not going to be sitting in any 18th-century chairs or fingering any 19th-century textiles to decide if you like them.

Which is too bad.

I like to imagine a museum of furniture/decorative arts/material culture that works like IKEA. What if there were an entire floor of reproduction furniture and objects and you were welcome to sit down in those rooms and, instead of imagining your apartment filled with wonderful IKEA furniture, you imagined a life two hundred years ago where these surroundings would have been familiar? What if each reproduction was marked with a tag, except instead of explaining what the product was called and how much it cost and where to find it in the store, it gave the age and provenance of the original it reproduced? What if there was another floor of open storage, where instead of tracking down your flat-pack furniture boxes to load onto your cart, you tracked down the original of the chair or curtain or plate that you had seen upstairs, to see the authentic (and untouchable) thing?

This is all fantasy, of course. There's that same issue of money that would probably make my imaginary IKEA museum prohibitively expensive. But if department stores can get close to what museums should have been doing in the 1910s, then IKEA can get even closer to what I wish museums could do now.