Furniture Pack Quality: Designer versus IKEA

To all Land-lord investors:

I'd like to dispel a few myths etc about furniture packs.

In my last job at Aston Martin, I was fortunate to have worked for an inspiring man, Paul Kidney, RIP. As a result of his passion for factual accuracy in problem solving & product robustness, he put himself in a very early grave. His legacy lives on with many though. One thing he used to hate, was Opinion-eering! In other words, people expressing fact when it was meerly an uneducated opinion. As Paul would say, ‘a man without facts is merely expressing an opinion’

As a landlord myself, as a Mechanical Engineer of more than 24 years & as someone working in the Rental market since 1995, I can speak as an authority.

I often hear people dismissing IKEA quality as rubbish, in preference for Designer packs in Romania, & the more avantguard shops. I've heard this from nervous clients & ill-informed or opinionated property selling agents.

Let me put the record straight as someone with vast product test & developement expereince of some very demanding products (Ford, Jauguar, Aston Martin). To properly create a product, it must be engineered, & then tested in life-cycle testing to simulate real-life conditions. You cannot merely design something, guess the right material selection & hope for the best, unless it is static furniture/ & or for light duty.

Many custom packs available really do look excellent & I would be the first to admit that.

However, behind the appearance, it is often the base materials or components that matter, particularly in kitchens, wardrobes, drawer units & other moving furniture. Example, wardrobes & kitchen unites made of Pal (plastic coated chip board) should be 18mm thick, not 15, unless non-load-bearing. Poorly built furniture will sag over time & because it is not made from solid wood, it is not always possible to recover the situation. Real wood has grain, & can take many many more times the load that compressed chip board can. So, bookshelves etc if merely decorative are ok, but if laden, will sag quickly.

I have no vested interest in Ikea, & indeed , detest the 3hr drive to go buy furniture there, but credit where it is due. They do have a very strict T&D policy & furniture is tested & developed fully for a given application, unless its is merely cheap, decorative etc. They too use cheap solutions (chipboard, MDF etc) but it is engineered with re-enforcements where needed. E.g., wide-span wardrobe shelves that one can often see sagging badly on cheap furniture, could be rectified with an opposing, bladelike support beam underneath to prevent sag.

One furniture producer here in Brasov make seating for Ikea & often complain about the waste they are mandated to throw away during Ikea production, when they believe it could be salvaged & used in Production. Ikea have very high standards for raw materials.

As a final comment, Ikea is not the ultimate furniture maker. Far from it. You ideally want real wood, & not just pine & beech, but good hard woods. But for most people, such options are beyond financial viability. For those, please do not dismiss Ikea in favour of high-style, low quality designer packs. It may be fine for now, but may deteriorate more quickly & have a smaller resale value.