https://nakashimawoodworkers.com (new commissions around $7K-$15K for a coffee table, $20K-40K for dining table, plus shipping; older Nakashima pieces are highly valued in the art world and sell anywhere between $15K-$300K)
Edit: Also, to echo what someone mentioned below, if you're interested in solid wood furniture you should find a local woodworker.
Another edit and thought: I used to own a lot of IKEA furniture and as I've gotten older, have slowly replaced those pieces with items from Knoll, with custom pieces from local woodworkers, with a few pieces from the studios listed above. A lot of people are commenting on the cost, and yes they're expensive and could be considered luxury goods.
But if you like art and design and you care about quality, you save for what you want to buy. I wanted to be surrounded by great craftsmanship, so instead of buying "stuff" and instead of spending money on lots of subscriptions and services, or constantly upgrading phones and computers, I buy one piece of nice furniture every year. I believe the more you appreciate the things around you, the more they begin to influence your own work, and your sense of place.
I regularly see a lot of IKEA furniture on the side of the road and in dumpsters. I think this is the difference between buying "things" and having "possessions" but that's a discussion for another day.
And these highlight the main reason why IKEA is still so successful. The apparent starting price for a bed appears to be $1800 on those sites (at least the ones in which I could easily find a price). Meanwhile IKEA has options under $200. I understand all the complaints that people have regarding the durability of IKEA furniture and how it is potentially getting worse, but replacing IKEA furniture every 2 years is still a more attractive deal for many people than replacing some higher quality stuff every 15-20 years.
I have a sofa I bought in 2005. I keep thinking I'll replace it after my next move, but even after several since then, it barely shows a fraction of its age (though I will admit a lack of kids or pets has likely helped).
I also bought an ottoman at some point after the sofa. It never looked great to start with, and I threw it out before the first move.
I have a desk of similar vintage to the sofa. I'm typing at it right now. I think I've been in offices with contract-grade furniture less durable than it.
I bought two different Ikea dressers over the years. One I didn't bother taking with me on the first move; the other is still holding up great several moves later.
In my experience, the trick is to move them without disassembly or with minimal disassembly (removing only moving parts like shelves that are planned to be removed) like any other furniture. Nothing weird with that: Most traditional furniture items made by a carpenter would be equally incompatible with disassembly.
Likewise, if you're not planning on moving then you can make Ikea furniture much stronger by adding wood glue between the pieces during assembly. That way it stays tight and nothing comes loose or flexes.
You clearly haven't tried moving with your local "designer furniture center" "high quality" furniture. IKEA is pretty much as good as the "quality furniture", when it comes to moving.
It highly depends on the region and the local manufacturers they use. IKEA furniture is of very good quality in the Baltic/Scandinavian region in my experience, and significantly poorer quality in the UK.
I’ve also seen many packing mistakes (like two right sides of an armchair and no left side being packed) and similar in the UK that I never encountered around the Baltics/Nordics. I think a lot depends on the work and business culture in the region, as I’ve noticed more emphasis on quality in a lot of things in Scandinavia.
USA bias I guess: they consider apartments undesirable, only to be tolerated by the younger and/or poorer - but families are expected to try for a house.
People who live in apartments in the US tend to move to another apartment frequently, either to get a better unit, to avoid a sharp rent increase, or to move to another neighborhood. We moved 7 times over a 20 year span.
It's definitely something you adapt to - I moved 7 times as a kid growing up with my family (one of those being overseas) and now it's something I actually look forward too when the comes around.
Most people in the US don't have any rent control, not even controls for percentage increase year to year.
When I was renting, I could expect a 10-15% increase year to year. With the current average apartment cost being $1700, that can mean paying an additional $500-$800 per month after 3 years. At that point it becomes worth it to look elsewhere.
No, if you live in an apartment your typical experience right now is one of rent increases pricing you out of your neighborhood - if you owned a home this wouldnt be a problem. So living in an apartment kinda has an implicit expiration - your time is up once you get priced out.
My point what I tried to make above -- why the assumption you're renting if you live in an apartment? Some naming convention I'm not familiar with that implies renting?
From reading other snippets - yes! Funnily enough, to me apartment exclusively refers to rentals, you would call it a condo if you purchased it but the connotations of condo to me are 'some one with too much money paying too much for too little'.
not everyone is in a tech hub and can jump jobs without moving. and the parent comment implies they're doing a 3-5 year jump / move.
that doesn't mean people can stay in the same place long term, but if you're going to be there for 10+ years it might make sense to buy. yeah yeah i get no one can do that in SF or London, but plenty of HN posters who aren't in those cities.
But if you buy, it would be more common to buy an apartment than a house, no? At least in European cities. Which would counter the assumption of short-term apartment living.
What was astonishing to me is the resale value of IKEA stuff. We sold off a bunch of furniture when we moved a year ago and I think that the price I got for my PAX unit was somewhere close to what my parents paid for it for me like 25 years ago.
Used furniture is a weird market because it's hard to match buyers and sellers. But for whatever reason people seek out IKEA stuff. I've never had a problem moving it and have generally been happy with the prices I get
IKEA is like a chain restaurant, you know what you’re getting into and there’s a fair bit of supply.
It is probably a lot easier to acquire a set of used Ikea furniture that matches reasonably well, than doing it with the random stuff that gets out there.
Unlike virtually all other brands, IKEA enables you to purchase additional parts years or even decades down the line. Instead of searching for a second-hand cabinet which 100% matches your needs, you just look for something which is close enough and buy a few additional shelves and door handles new.
I was going to comment this as well. Similar to a used Hondas, IKEA furniture can fetch higher prices because it’s so ubiquitous and easy to own. You know it will be easy to move, what to expect, and where you can find spare parts.
Not to mention when people need only one thing from IKEA, some will pay a premium to get it from down the street versus driving to IKEA.
The IKEA products are recognizable and easy to measurements for online. It's likely people have tried them out before because they're so common as well (or they've walked through the store a few times).
Besides that: no thanks to solid wood. It's super heavy and annoying to move around, and I say that as a guy. A woman of a smaller build or a child that needs to move a bit of furniture will hate them even more. Especially stuff like chairs.
There's a lot of people saying solid wood furniture is more sustainable. I seriously doubt that though. If you like solid wood, and you make sure to take care of it, then I think it's a good choice. As long as not too many of us do it at the same time.
Imagine how much hardwood you'd suddenly have to cut down if everyone started buying these instead of IKEA furniture.
You can use the price as a rough proxy for resource consumption. In my experience IKEA furniture lasts a good fraction of a lifetime. You can buy several for the price of one of these solid wood furniture, and I think you can also buy several before the resource impact is the same as well.
I'm honestly quite impressed with the engineering they're doing with cardboard these days. We have a coffee table and two wall shelves mounted below a TV.. and we have kids. They get treated badly, and they can take it. I hope to replace the coffee table with something nicer one day, but the IKEA one can get a second life in the basement.
The only thing I would have wished was solid wood is our dining table. The veneer is a bit damaged from moisture or heat. If it was solid wood we could've sanded and treated it.
I think the sustainable thing is a combination of IKEAs approach and solid wood. Every solid wood furniture bought will hopefully reduce the amount of trees we cut down over the long term, if they're well taken care of. Eventually it'll reduce the amount of IKEA-style furniture that has to be made. But right now that the population is still growing so much, and we need so much new furniture for new households, I suspect the best thing is to use the fastest growing wood and use as little as possible of it in the furniture.
Agreed, I think the complaints about IKEA sustainability is mostly just a luxury belief. IKEA furniture is cheaper because it uses fewer resources (especially less wood). When lightly used in a home environment a lot of it can last a very long time.
These are, unfortunately, luxury goods. I don't want them to be. There was a time when they weren't. But they're now luxury goods. The masses have to suffer Ikea - it's all we can afford. The above stuff is for the upper classes.
I'm not sure if that's true. My impression is that furniture has always been very expensive, and it's only fairly recently (mid-20th century?) that mass manufacturing has enabled it to be cheap, with IKEA being one of the most well-known examples.
There was a time, about 1.6 million years, when you could bring your axe into the woods, maybe with a friend or two, cut a clearing, and build a whole house with wood furniture that your great great grandchildren would use.
You could eat the abundant animals, drink the clean water, and enjoy an entire life without ever once imbibing microplastics and PFAS.
It might have been a lot of work - but it was completely free. Those times are long gone, and it doesn't seem likely they'll ever return -- but that is how we lived for the vast majority of our time as human beings.
But then you died from a minor cut you got while building that house, and before that you buried most of your young children. A life spent assembling IKEA may not be the best life, but it sure beats that.
I suggest you go visit an exhibition on how people in the dark ages or in the middle ages lived.
YOu probably live with hot and cold water, that you can drink... and pretty much everyone in the developed world can afford a banana... that kind of "luxury" wasn't available to kings just 200 years ago.
The statement I was responding to claimed that humans could never afford nice furniture. But we've had axes for 1.6 million years, and abundant old-growth forests for 1.6 million years, and so, for the vast, vast, vast majority of human history we have in fact had the ability to make sturdy, beautiful, long lasting furniture completely for free.
The middle ages and the "dark" ages weren't even all that bad. They had more free time than we did. They had far more birds and beasts. They paid less taxes. They didn't have a multi-billion dollar ad industry telling them they're not good enough. They lived with nature, a nature we'll never know.
Yes, there was the war and the religious craziness and the fear of apocalypse - wait a minute, we still have all of that stuff except the fear of apocalypse is way more legit now.
I love modern plumbing, and many aspects of the internet. I love the access to culture and knowledge. Antibiotics are cool. I'd rather live now than then. But the idea that people 500; 5,000; or 500,000 years ago had nasty lives far inferior to our own is not entirely justified.
Again though - that's all off topic. Those guys 500,000 years ago had free housing, free wood to burn, and incredible biodiversity which we'll never be able to appreciate in our world of modern anthropocene extinction. And, probably, really nice furniture; if they wanted to make it.
> vast, vast, vast majority of human history we have in fact had the ability to make sturdy, beautiful, long lasting furniture completely for free
Again... Go visit and Egyptological museum. Go see how rough, compared to modern furniture, the royal masterpiece chairs were.
For the 1599950 out of 1600000 years humans definitely could not afford or had any nice furniture. Absolute majority couldn't afford even rough sturdy, unnice furniture. And your comment about "free housing" is naive... It wasn't free and desirable places had their own issues.
Taking a dump on companies like IKEA is very much the most condescending thing we could do. I certainly have experienced the inability to purchase even the most basic necessities, where IKEA would have provided some relief.
... I didn't dump on Ikea anywhere. Not remotely. Neither did GP.
Nor did I speak of comfort. Nor did GP.
Perhaps you are taking context from elsewhere in the comments and misapplying it to this little thread?
I spoke of beauty and sturdiness and longevity; nature, biodiversity.
I've been to many museums; I've seen the thrones. Roughness doesn't matter when you're putting cushions on, or when your buns are tough from years without sitting on padded chairs.
Your definition of nice furniture is very different from mine, clearly. I suggest that you might try to see things from a broader perspective.
On your other points:
Egypt wasn't known for its abundant forests - I don't know why you would expect great carpentry. Their cushions won't be in the museum, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
You cannot seriously claim only the furniture of the last 50 years is nice, while excoriating me for my lack of knowledge of how ancient people lived. Go read some descriptions of Sumerian furniture.
And yes, if you take your stone axe in 1.5 million BC, and clear a space, and build a house, it's free. Hard work - as I said - but free. No property taxes, no mortgage. Free. No HOA, no building standards... Free. There's nothing "naive" about that. What's patently naive is this insistence that only modern people have any sense of craftsmanship or comfort or quality - I say that because it's true, and you need to hear it; not to flame.
> There are vast swathes of land on this planet, where you can go and do exactly what our great ancestors did 1mil years ago.
You'll be eating microplastics, drinking polluted water, and enjoying a far smaller spread of biodiversity. As I said.
There is nowhere on Earth that you can escape those facts any more. Microplastics and PFAs are on Mt Everest, and the Mariana Trench, and everywhere in between; and the Anthropocene Extinction is a real thing.
I also explicitly pointed out the labor involved, so I don't understand why you keep calling that out like some sort of gotcha.
Any luck researching Sumerian furniture? Nice, innit?
> Those guys 500,000 years ago had free housing, free wood to burn, and incredible biodiversity which we'll never be able to appreciate in our world of modern anthropocene extinction. And, probably, really nice furniture; if they wanted to make it.
Step one: invent iron tools roughly 500,000 years early.
"Really nice furniture" involves a lot more than the easy availability of big chunks of wood. Paying a skilled craftsman to spend time to work on something is fundamentally expensive. That expense speaks to what the person you initially replied to was talking about vis a vis mass manufacturing.
Really nice furniture can also be defined as solid, old-growth wood furniture, designed and made to your own specifications, that will last for hundreds of years.
Holding up an unfinished piece of (really nice, apparently) wood, worked by an amateur (to his own specifications!) with primitive tools as equal to what sane people refer to as "furniture" is a blatant misunderstanding of craftsmanship, and much more importantly the whole discussion very deliberately misses the economic point of the person you originally responded to. It's weird that you're so insistent about it.
"Sane people" - really? That's not polite, but anyway...
There are a looooot of people, especially craftsmen, who can appreciate heavy and well built, if rough, furniture. Even if it's worked with primitive tools, that stuff looks and smells and lasts better than anything - anything from IKEA. Especially when it's made with not just nice but gorgeous wood - mahogony, rosewood, oak, teak, etc. The stuff you can hardly buy for any money these days.
And no, I'm not "deliberately missing the economic point" - I'm adding the perspective of a wider range of human history than the last 50 years. The perspective of >99.99% of human history. For all that time, such furniture was not just cheap but free + labour. The trees were abundant, and we used them.
As for being insistent, I'm not - you can believe whatever you like - but it would be cool if you stopped trying to put the worst possible take on my words.
> it would be cool if you stopped trying to put the worst possible take on my words.
Your words are... really something. I feel like as an exercise, you should go try to make something useful out of a downed tree (find a good one!) with chips of flint and obsidian and at the end of the process show people the beautiful thing you made. Let them know how long it took, and how that time and effort ought to be considered "inexpensive."
I have carved stuff - it's fun, and doesn't require a huge amount of strength. With a little guidance you can make lovely stuff, really quickly.
You don't carve it with "chips" you know - you use a knife... Or an axe. Such as the one I mentioned, explicitly. Multiple times now.
But those trees are extremely hard to find now; illegal to chop down, in most parts of the west. We already cut down the vast, vast, vast majority of them. I've said that at least 3 times.
Yes, my words are something - maybe you could read them? You never know, you might learn something.
...
Do you think people didn't use furniture until we had cities? Spoiler: We sure did.
Do you think the only reason neolithic people spent hours knapping knives and axes was for fun / murder? It wasn't. They made stuff.
You think those people sat on the dirt their whole lives? Nope. We know this, because we have surviving examples of stone furniture - usually where wood was scarce...
Do you still think craftspeople don't appreciate solid wood furniture? ... They do. Ask them.
Or that all craftspeople would prefer the composite pine of an IKEA piece? Or that the IKEA piece would last longer? Nah. Not even close.
...
For well over a million years of our history, we had plenty of time to sit by the roaring fire, carving things and telling stories, singing songs. It wasn't all ooga-booga in caves you know.
And while we did this, making things, we got real good at it. We had damn near the exact same brain. It's rather arrogant, and ignorant, to think that those things they made were garbage compared to an IKEA POANG... You don't really think that, do you?
We have pictures, carved in stone, of furniture from 2500 years ago. It kicks ass - it's gorgeous. Nothing in IKEA compares, either in ornamentation or build quality.
> Let them know how long it took, and how that time and effort ought to be considered "inexpensive."
My brother in crust, I've explained at least 4 times now, including in the original comment, that I was using the word free as in free + labour. You can't keep trying to beat me with that stick; it's silly.
You're arguing for "how great it was a million years go". And I can place a good bet, that you had zero experience with woodworking... let alone green woodworking.
This is when I like to point out that you can find skilled carpenters who will make you custom furniture sized just how you want for less than that. That is what I did in my kitchen nook.
That's a good point. I have an older guy I met at a farmer's market, in my phone under Greg Shelves, it's a land line, I have to pay in cash. The problem is I never know exactly what I'm going get, but it is always nice.
Just clicked on the first link: $1225 for one chair (https://www.thejoinery.com/furniture/dining-chairs-dining-ro...). I have 4 Ikea STEFAN. Around $47 each. Been 4 years already and they are still intact. Sure, the quality of the Hayden is way better, but 26 times better? I don't think so.
The next generation probably won't even want those pieces because they will have different lifestyles and preferences. If you want to buy nice furniture and can afford it then go ahead, but when you die it will most likely be thrown away or donated to Goodwill.
This is particularly true with people having fewer kids. 10 pieces of furniture goes fast when you have 20+ grandchildren. Not so much when you have 2 grandchildren.
I inherited Vitra furniture and Artemide lights. Decades old but still fashionable and they hold their value well. I will likely pass these down to my children one day.
One of the lights I inherited is a Tizio with halogen light. It still works. I can save 10 euro per year by throwing away the lamp and buying the LED version. Seems wasteful though, so I just keep it working. I don't see it as obsolete.
The other one has an E27 fitting and fits a regular IKEA or Philips LED bulb, even the smart ones or the ones with temperature adjustments.
> They do save you money but on a very long timescale
You're not going to save money by replacing your Ikea furniture with handcrafted wood furniture that's 25 times the price. Whenever you move, it'll cost more to move the nice chair. You'll eventually have to reupholster it. You'll need to find other hardwood furniture to match it. It'll be way way more expensive over it's lifetime.
The furniture looks and feels nicer to us, was made with thoughtfulness, and is unique, and that's why people buy it, not because it saves money.
I mean the antique Amish furniture I inherited from my grandparents has definitely saved me money. Free and better than anything I could afford. That's what I mean by being a generational purchase. I probably should have said it will save your family money.
> Whenever you move, it'll cost more to move the nice chair
> You'll need to find other hardwood furniture to match it.
Hahahaha. Bro, how rich you think I am? The desk I have is currently sitting next to an Ikea bookshelf, it looks fine. I moved it by putting it in the back of my friend's truck. I'm never selling it so a few scratches are fine.
And costly to maintain as well. Source: have some wegner y stol or whatever from before me where the rope/strings are about to disintegrate (thanks, cats..). A small fortune if I want to refurbish them.
This gets to the heart of the argument Christopher Schwarz makes in his book, The Anarchist's Design Book [1], which is that it's nearly impossible for people who aren't rich to buy high quality furniture that will last a lifetime. An alternative is to build it yourself. The Anarchist's Design book presents relatively simple plans for building high quality furniture without requiring a ton of experience or tools.
Who actually wants the same furniture for life though? People move houses often. In my state the average length of a 15/30 year mortgage is 5 years, meaning the homeowner either refinances or sells and moves to another home.
New home means new furniture, and if the old furniture doesn’t fit the new home’s style then sorry, it’s out and something else replaces it.
The idea of people living in the same house for 30-50 years is dead. IKEA understands this, so they create furniture that lasts the average length of a mortgage.
I only bring this up because the GP post is talking about furniture you build yourself, but when you design and build something you will likely want it for significantly longer. I'm sitting at a desk I designed and built last summer. It represents around 80 hours of work over 4 months, from design to implementation. Everyone who sees it oooh's and aaah's, and I expect to have this desk until I die.
It's surrounded by Ikea stuff that will be thrown away when we move next.
From what I understand this is a part of why Ikea's furniture has such wide appeal. You had a hand in building it, so you have some attachment to it.
> high quality furniture that will last a lifetime
Other caveat being high quality furniture rarely last a life time, restoration / repair can cost more than normal furniture. Another consideration is some luxury furniture / design pieces don't perform that well to heavy every day wear. There's a lot of pieces in big homes / spaces that gets very occasional use.
These are all stunning. Excellent craft is worth it. It’s beautiful when something lasts forever.
Maybe I’m too young (I don’t think so, I’m 32), but I have been impressed with how long some of my IKEA pieces have held up. Since IKEA products are so easy to disassemble and often modular, they are easy to buy and sell. I’ve bought countless used IKEA items over the years and sold nearly as many. These products are perfect for people who constantly move or have changing needs.
I will add another thing - handmade solid wood furniture is never dimensionally accurate. So you can't mix and match, as much as you can with many IKEA pieces.
To add to this, I've liked the Room & Board furniture I've purchased as well. It's pretty simple design-wise, but solid wood, American-made (if you care about things like that), and broadly available. But honestly, the nicest piece of furniture I have is something I commissioned a local cabinet maker to make. It was only marginally more expensive than what a comparable piece at R&B would cost, but was completely custom in a way that R&B could not be, and it was also nice to support local woodworkers.
Buy it for life is right. I've inherited plenty of buy it for life furniture from family and friends, had some repaired and refinished, bought others off craigslist or estate sales etc, some are on their last legs or are too special to be anything but an heirloom as opposed to usable furniture. Of course things don't stay beautiful forever without care; kids (myself included, I damaged some nice furniture when little) are probably the most destructive force.
I still go back and forth (have a need for bookshelves right now) between the price tiers of Ikea's Billy, local used sales, and new wood furniture. But I've never regretted buying something nice.
> yes they're expensive and could be considered luxury goods
They are luxury goods.
We know well that melamine board furniture lasts a lifetime, and there's little need to have a $15k coffee table. Getting a local woodworker to build you anything larger than a pair of side tables is thousands of dollars, without even the material costs.
Your whole comment is a little detached from reality and reads very condescending.
Can anyone suggest something that is there anything reasonably priced? I'm willing to pay 5-10x IKEA prices, but most of the products here are 25x IKEA prices. Room and Board is the only place I see that is somewhat attainable on this list. Most of my IKEA pieces last a decade so there is no way I can economically justify these prices.
https://www.gingkofurniture.com has plenty of stuff in the $400-2k range, and most of their pieces are also buy it for life. Solid hardwood (walnut) construction, steel-framed shelving, etc. They have physical locations in the bay area.
I keep a text file of interesting hn discussions/comments. I maintain a sort-of format where the URL goes on the first line and the next line is the article title and below that any key words then skip a line for the next. I have a directory full of text files with links sorted by topic. I have a command that just greps that directory and tells me the text file and line number.
Gah! I did not explain that right at all. I wrote that in the middle of travel.
The sort-of format is "Article title", article URL, URL to HN discussion or comment of interest, keywords or phrases that help grepping, newline after each line. I then use a simple grep script called looklink that just does a grep -ni $1 $home/doc/links/*
Why this route? Bookmarking in a browser doesn't let me add context and metadata to the URL the where a flat text file lets me do that. Plus I have to put in effort to add the link so you wind up with more focused and interesting links instead of a bunch of crap you thought you might be interested in. Meanwhile you cand find the actual link you want because there's no real metadata with it.
https://www.thejoinery.com
https://vermontwoodsstudios.com/
https://hedgehousefurniture.com
https://57stdesign.com
https://www.57thstreetbookcase.com/ (all bookcases, some veneer and plywood)
https://www.spekeklein.com/home
https://www.pompy.com/
https://www.chiltons.com/
https://roomandboard.com (mix of solid and veneer, some MDF)
These makers are in a league of their own, very expensive, incredibly beautiful hand-made pieces:
https://www.sammaloofwoodworker.com
https://www.thosmoser.com (highly recommended)
https://nakashimawoodworkers.com (new commissions around $7K-$15K for a coffee table, $20K-40K for dining table, plus shipping; older Nakashima pieces are highly valued in the art world and sell anywhere between $15K-$300K)
https://www.wright20.com/search/nakashima/items#past
Edit: Also, to echo what someone mentioned below, if you're interested in solid wood furniture you should find a local woodworker.
Another edit and thought: I used to own a lot of IKEA furniture and as I've gotten older, have slowly replaced those pieces with items from Knoll, with custom pieces from local woodworkers, with a few pieces from the studios listed above. A lot of people are commenting on the cost, and yes they're expensive and could be considered luxury goods.
But if you like art and design and you care about quality, you save for what you want to buy. I wanted to be surrounded by great craftsmanship, so instead of buying "stuff" and instead of spending money on lots of subscriptions and services, or constantly upgrading phones and computers, I buy one piece of nice furniture every year. I believe the more you appreciate the things around you, the more they begin to influence your own work, and your sense of place.
I regularly see a lot of IKEA furniture on the side of the road and in dumpsters. I think this is the difference between buying "things" and having "possessions" but that's a discussion for another day.