For years fellow Doper Martha and I hoped against hope that one day Santo Domingo would have its very own Ikea. We were even open to sleep with whoever was necessary to see that happen. No Scandinavians showed up to collect.
Well, there is now good and bad news:
It’s official! Next year Santo Domingo will have the first Ikea store in Latin America.
**Hurray! **
Cheap Swedish furniture, that more likely than not will not withstand the rigors of life in the tropics. Who cares? It’s cheap, modern stuff.
No more navigating through the thousand Rococo and Narc-Deco*-furniture-filled stores to find something more akin to our modern sensibilities.
No more longing for the next trip to Europe so we can stock on knick-knacks, while we quietly curse airlines that wouldn’t let us carry a sofa or two.
Long live affordable, creative, modern Scandinavian design.
The bad news: We’re leaving Santo Domingo next June.
Fuck you Ikea!
*Martha came up with that. Here’s an approximation of the style.
I couldn’t tell from the website, but it sounds like the store may be opening after she leaves. I haven’t been able to find anything on-line which says when it will open; merely that it will open in 2009.
Mighty_Girl, I suppose I shouldn’t tell you that, even as I type, the gentleman is picking up a new computer desk from IKEA, should I? : ducks and runs:
If you haven’t endured what we have for all these years - furniture with fucking mahogany TENTACLES and garish brocade upholstery all crammed together in an eruption of rococo that makes Liberace’s mansion look restrained, and pseudo classical columns that look more like stage props for an amateur production of some Greek tragedy - you’ll never, ever, ever appreciate the magnitude of our indignation. And gold, don’t forget the gold. ‘More is more’ is the motto. :mad:
So yes, fuck them, with their Swedish meatballs and their Abba muzak and their tasteful, muted, minimalist, cheerful, affordable… ::sobs helplessly::
Who cares about the metro? We are going to have an Ikea, finally we join the civilized world. Now, if only we could learn how to drive…
Yes, it is.
Florida? Meh. You guys have too many hurricanes.
We are moving to the Independent Republic of Punta Cana (4.5 hrs from Santo Domingo). We are still planning to do at least a yearly pilgrimage to the Mecca of non-Rococo-furniture-lovers.
In the end, after much poking around, I bought most of our furniture from an office furniture supplier. The rest I designed myself and had it done by a local carpenter (who probably thought I was crazy, what with my desire for non-tentacled furniture).
Hmm… as an aside: I am born and bred Dominican, but I lack the Rococo gene. We had “*campesino *chic” furniture in our home. You know, solid, heavy, simple pieces of rock-hard wood furniture. Chairs that would be a deadly weapon in a bar fight and that survived for generations.
I studied Industrial Design as my first career (moved on to other things later), so I was struck by the beauty of minimalist Scandinavian design (mostly Danish). Half a decade later I would meet a Dane and travel to Denmark for the first time, and spent four weeks visiting every store that sold furniture that I came across.
Ikea is modern design for the masses. I don’t care for signature pieces just as I don’t care for golden Greek columns.
I guess that I’ll have to sit on shipping crates and upside-down empty buckets in our new home while Ikea opens the new store.
Understatement is good. I’ve seen pictures of rococo sculpture from Italy and it impresses me, but I’m not sure I’d want it in the apartment. My uncle was Swedish and I grew up with a lot of blond wood on that side of the family, though he and my aunt lived in Bavaria for a time and their knickknacks tend to slop over into cuckoo-clock territory.
(bolding mine) On these boards, that is a very… wise move.
I can’t take the Metro to Ikea. I will be in the countryside. My husband hates Ikea. It’s a Swedish-Danish thing, you know, like sibling rivalry. He prefers to buy the Danish equivalent, who happens to be of better quality, and of course, more expensive. There is a shop here that sells Danish furniture. It’s much more expensive than better-quality custom made.
And I love blond wood. It’s hard to find around here as there were no local trees with blond wood (our pine trees are dark yellow), and local taste adapted even after a countrywide ban on cutting trees came into effect decades ago.
I would love to have a birch kitchen in our new home, but I haven’t even been able to get any lumberyard here that stocks it, or even knows what I am talking about.
:: looks at link ::
Man, for an alleged ‘private executive development’, you’d think they could hire a competent English editor, or at least run the spell checker over their web pages…
Yes, I’m aware of Danish Modern furniture in sort of the same way that I’m aware of Mercedes cars: I know they’re around, but I don’t expect that I’d ever be able to get one.
I could mail you some birch toothpicks, and you could start from there?
Oh my, narcs like Versace, I see! At his most coked-up, too, one would imagine.
Last Saturday IKEA UK celebrated its 21st anniversary with a 21% discount. Me an’ six more Spaniards (two of which aren’t in place yet) came to the UK last Monday and are currently looking for apartments. Drat and damnination!
Oh well, we’re still planning a shopping trip or two… or three… is it bad if you find yourself looking forward to a new flat 'cos it means a shopping trip? I swear 99% of the time I hate shopping, it’s only decoration and electronics that have this effect (at the Apple store yesterday we had to drag our only guy out before he bought a laptop he absolutely does not need).
I don’t know what it is about IKEA that fills me with such acquisitiveness. They have IKEA in Istanbul and Bucharest and it was really, really tempting to go when I was in those cities. Despite the fact that I’m leaving Bulgaria soon and that it’s completely impractical (not to say totally crazy) for people on backpacking trips to go to furniture stores, it was hard to resist the pull of that blue and yellow sign.
Also, the IKEA cafeteria is surprisingly good! Mmm…IKEA…
Well, it’s more like someone of Flavor Flav’s class, impeccable taste and finesse but with Pablo Escobar’s money and hmmm… cough, line of business. You got to spend those greens, you know.
Now, if only we could learn how to drive…
