IKEA is every style and apartment owners dream store. The Swedish furniture giant has been fairly settled in the land down under for a number of years now, and we can safely say we house the largest store in the Southern Hemisphere (thanks, Tempe!), and it looks as though it’s here to stay. With low priced, quality furniture and house hold knick knacks, it has become the one-stop shop for young millennials seeking a good backbone for their first home.
With the rise of house prices skyrocketing in recent years, the average home owner is looking for smaller apartments and studio buildings to call their own. But the issue is in the space. Sometimes the kitchen, living room and bedroom are just one room, and it becomes difficult to create dimension and sustain privacy in a setting as close knit as that.
So the moguls at IKEA have sought respite from this issue. Why not create moveable walls that can be easily pushed into compact spaces to create the illusion of space and privacy? Why not indeed. In their native Sweden, cramped homes were put to the test with these very moveable walls, placing families in the living quarters for two weeks at a time to see how they’d fair. Turns out the patrons testing the idea where more than a little impressed.
The issue will become the price, and sufficiently meeting particular safety recommendations. Usually this kind of design is confined to wealthy penthouses and decadent boardrooms, but there are great attempts being made to salvage a similar type of aesthetic for the middle-class family.
The walls will probably still be a prototype for the next three years, but the IKEA designers are hoping that after this time they’ll crop up in catalogues the world over.
