The Unexpected Healing Power of the Ikea Catalog

Throughout 2024, Bon Appétit published a series called The Fourth Trimester, asking writers who were also new parents, "What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby?" The stories were beautiful and difficult, from parents who were struggling through postpartum depression or to feed themselves after a rough delivery. Revisiting these stories this year, as I was pregnant with my first child, they read as a sort of updated What to Expect When You’re Expecting, the often-referenced manual for parenting. The essays were guides to the experiences that I might—and later did—encounter: incredible waves of grief expressible only through crying in the shower; the whiplash of a body changing rapidly overnight; a sudden flip into depression caused by hormonal crashes and little sleep.

Bon Appétit prepared me for all of that, but there was something I did not anticipate after returning from the hospital—a surprising hatred for every piece of furniture I own. Walking back into my apartment with a new baby in her car seat, I looked around my living room and immediately thought, "Who chose all this?" Reader, I chose all this: a mustard-yellow velvet sofa (my favorite color) that now mimics the hue of breastfed-infant feces. The vintage burnt-orange mini-recliner gifted by my partner’s grandmother (after I repeatedly asked for it) is actually not easily curled up on. Handmade, multicolor shag rugs that shed clumps of fiber are just another chore. The place looks slapped together, my maximalist aesthetic suddenly too fucking loud when all I need is 10 minutes of peace.

But three weeks in, sitting on my unfortunate sofa at 5 a.m., I found a balm to my unhappy buyer’s remorse, a way to transport myself out of a chaotic home and dark postpartum feelings. Enter the Ikea catalog.

For those not acquainted, the Ikea catalog was, beginning in the 1950s, the only way to purchase furniture from the then mail-order manufacturer in Scandinavia. Images of carefully orchestrated furniture and decor, not unlike the theatrical assemblages we see in today’s gargantuan showrooms, filled each page. Throughout its 70 years, the thick book evolved as its distribution spread worldwide. A detailed "remembrance" from Ikea’s blog describes how founder ​​Ingvar Kamprad led the publication’s art direction and even wrote the descriptive text himself. Later, at the helm of Brita Lang, the catalog became an authority on interior design trends, allowing readers to develop their own sense of taste and style. The bulk of images in the catalog showcased products until the 1970s, when, I noticed, photos started to feature people. In 1973, a happy couple lounged on the sculptural Tajt seating; a year later, pals smoked cigarettes while listening to records on a forest green Soffgrupp Elegant set. As the catalog’s reach spread, the company even released region-specific editions with different covers and (sometimes controversially) adapted images to suit different cultures.

Sadly, the catalog was discontinued in 2021 as consumer buying had shifted to e-commerce. Customers mourned; unlike the now-vanished catalogs of JCPenney or Sears, some Swedish residents posted notices on their front doors that read, "No advertising or junk mail please, just the Ikea catalog." To honor these nostalgic fans, the entire catalog collection was digitized as a public "museum" shortly after. I stumbled on a few digitized catalog images in 2024 after hearing a MCM furniture collector gush about vintage Ikea pieces. (I recall little from the experience except that I don’t speak Swedish).

Fast-forward to September 2025, a week after arriving home to my disgustingly furnished home, when I started scrolling interior design Instagram in the middle of the night. As one of the go-to platforms for "design inspo," I was bombarded with tiny squares of naturally lit living rooms with matching sofa sets, funky lamps, carefully selected vintage accent pieces, and floating shelves. Everything looked so clean, sharp, and curated, and it made me angrier beyond reason. On a platform originally designed for documenting and sharing one’s daily life, these images morphed into representations of rooms that could never really be. They wanted me to believe that even I, a new parent in crisis sitting in a dimly lit room on a pile of laundry, could live that beautifully. Perhaps this makes the social network a great selling tool, but in my emotional state all masks were off and the capitalism machine was too much to handle.

Though the Ikea catalog also was designed to sell things, I longed for its honesty. Decades after the production and distribution of those photos, their grainy flatness feels less like an ad and more like proof-of-life from the past. I flipped through austere 1950s "living rooms" and their MCM displays, straight through the ’80s when bulky televisions and multideck cassette towers replaced record players on black laminate shelves. Matching the black metal-and-glass Lagun/Cajus soffbord (coffee table) in a living room, the furnishings, together, screamed family-friendly cocaine-chic. For the first time in weeks, I laughed.

I slowed my pace in the ’90s, the era of my own childhood, to gawk at the decade’s crappy aesthetic and bric-a-brac decor. Over the course of a particularly grim week when my baby’s eyes opened and she screamed so loudly her mouth quivered, I studied Ikea’s 1997 catalog (once the baby finally slept after two, three, four times rocked and bounced). The cover itself is absurd: a taut white sofa and matching chair sit at odd angles semi-facing each other; sky blue floors embellished with cloudlike white fur rugs (faux?) arranged in no particular order; a dated laptop workstation includes an "office chair" that’s essentially a tripod with a bicycle seat mounted on top. The ’90s!

But what kept me engrossed was just how unfussy all of it seemed. The overstuffed sofas with awkward upholstery tugging at the corners have far too many throw pillows to make sitting comfortable, and wooden kitchen tables sport mismatched chairs as some type of "design flourish." Spending time with a static catalog that doesn’t augment based on an algorithm to serve me up more of what I like was a sensorial relief. What ultimately soothed my spirit was the mess: there are magazines strewn on floors and wrinkled shirts hanging from undulating metal racks. Here, in the ’90s Ikea-verse, my tendencies toward sloppiness become an aesthetic choice. The red magazine rack in my living room teetering with aging clips of my work from now-defunct magazines and copies of the New Yorker that I’ll never read is intentional, not the result of a career in a languishing industry or postpartum depression that prevents me from recycling.

"Reading" every issue of the Ikea catalog (again emphasizing that I still don’t speak Swedish) feels not so different from bringing a tiny human home and watching her change. She still screams until her mouth shakes, but she also has begun taking interest in textures, lights, and new sounds. The grave sadness, the awareness of my own mortality, will someday settle into the background. It will pass, as will the phase of not sleeping. Maybe my hatred of my furniture will pass, too, or become a series of listings on Facebook Marketplace. The Ikea catalog became an unlikely reminder of change’s inevitability, whether of one’s living room decor choices, or in raising a child.

Top photo from pages 10-11 of Ikea’s 1997 catalog courtesy © Inter IKEA Systems B.V.

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