Scandi Darling

Determined to wage war on the proliferation of gray, I marched over to Performance Space New York for Color Theories, Julio Torres’s latest comedy special, a self-described “pilot demonstration” of a “new mandatory course” for public schools. Torres, a nutty professor–meets–space prince, uses the color spectrum as an organizing principle for observational humor and surreal storytelling. White, in his taxonomy, represents what is known—the starch of a doctor’s coat contrasting with the nurse’s softer, “don’t ask me” scrubs in hues of “anything but white.” Black is what can’t be known. Which is why Torres suggests waiting rooms are often gray: “You are halfway between not knowing anything and knowing too much.”

Later, I revisited my notes of the show, splaying out my spiral-bound over a new black-and-white striped IKEA duvet cover. I had spent the better part of the year going gray, seeking stability through the holy trinity of American self-help—psychiatry appointments, home improvement, and habit tracking apps. Eventually, the disciplined routine I had established fell victim to the catch-all cure of consumerism, and I began scouring Facebook Marketplace for fleeting finds or taking compulsive trips to IKEA, seeking solace through secondhand stores and sunny Scandi design solutions.

I’ve always been a bit of a stooper; two-year-old Eric, I’ve been told, was fascinated by garbagemen. (They clearly wanted whatever was in there. Would they want me too if I were garbage?) My twenties could be defined as a slow accumulation of street scores, from side tables to side pieces; city life became an exercise in fateful engagements with free love and free furniture. But a cocktail of monogamy and medication had me feeling acquisitive like never before—turning my one-bedroom into a paint chip gallery show of domestic design, hunting not for hookups but for harmony.

The first major Marketplace piece I bought—a sliding barn door (sleek, not farmhouse)—came from a Midtown office. I drove to Thirty-Eighth and Seventh in the middle of the day with my boyfriend, Jonny, in tow. Inside, I met the husband of the woman I’d been messaging, a tall, handsome Ukrainian man with piercing blue eyes and the faintest aura of criminality. After obtaining the door from a sparse office suite, I noticed a disassembled metal-and-glass table placed next to the elevator bank—a Niels Gammelgaard Moment Table (1983), one of the most sought-after vintage IKEA pieces. When I asked as nonchalantly as possible if it was for sale, he shrugged and texted his wife. She said: fifty dollars.

Jonny had agreed to help with the door, but my new steal threatened to weigh down the domestic bliss of moving heavy furniture together. As quickly as possible, we bungee-corded both items into my Prius—the minivan of childless midthirty-somethings—and bridge-and-tunneled back to Brooklyn, where I do not have a dining room. Coming to terms with my apartment’s spatial limitations, I listed the table, now leaning against the wall in my closet, on Marketplace, eventually selling it for $1000 to a girl from Jersey City.

I was hooked. I wasn’t consuming, I was curating. I wandered into Object Permanence, a 1980s design shop where a girl was “store sitting” for her reseller friend, who was at a wedding. I told her I was getting in on the action, citing my Gammelgaard gamesmanship. She told me to “get a storage unit.” As I poked around, I overheard her mention an IKEA pop-up—something about Gustaf Westman, an industrial design gay of the moment—which is how, a few days later, I was walking into IKEA’s blue-and-yellow-coded “housewarming” activation on Union Square.

Inside, I darted from sample station to staged salon, including a 1985-themed photobooth and lounge that marked forty years since the Swedish seller entered the American market. In the IKEA Kitchen Lab, a headset-wearing woman in yellow struggled with an induction burner for an infused olive oil demo while a balding troubleshooter in a black-and-blue striped shirt rushed to her aid. Elsewhere, Westman’s coveted tableware collection, cloaked behind a curving hospital-like curtain, resembled the pallid palette of “don’t ask me” scrubs, its design administering a numbing dose of nursery nostalgia. Back at the burner, the headset host was trying to heat the hygge hype house. “Are we ready for meatball happy hour?” she hollered. Lukewarm cheers.

For some, IKEA is a scourge, the foremost purveyor of particle board, a fast furniture free-for-all, complicit with overconsumption and globalization. Others laud its DIY design principles and Swedish pragmatism. Survivors from its neo-modernist era—specifically metal-and-glass pieces like the Moment Table or Knut Hagberg’s Kromvik bed (1981)—have aged well. More than that, these objects preserve the social-democratic spirit that remained flat-packed, stateside, until Mamdani finally found an Allen wrench.

Seeking more context, I visited IKEA at Ciccio New York. Originally staged by Thomas Eggerer and Jochen Klein at Printed Matter in 1996, the installation posited that, even before the retailer’s global expansion, IKEA had co-opted the radical domesticity theorized by Italian leftist designers in the 1970s. The show specifically cited Gillis Lundgren’s Tajt, a reconfigurable upholstered chair from 1973, whose design repackaged the “mattress camps” of lefty layabouts as a lifestyle. A catalogue spread from the time depicts a cool dad and his attentive daughter lounging on Lundgren’s blue jean–clad collection, the generational divide mended by denim.

As I ended my experimentation with SSRIs and stimulants, my Marketplace mania faded. I looked around my apartment, my amassment of foraged furniture, and the bare walls I had once chalked up to minimalism and gallery chic. My transient, noncommittal, forever-renter aesthetic suddenly felt like a straitjacket—maybe even an illness. I attended a book launch for Sick Architecture (MIT Press), where Mark Wigley offered his own color theory on modernism’s unhealthy obsession with whiteness. It made me think of a bathroom excavation I attempted during a period of stir-craziness: Chipping away at layers of paint on a doorframe, I got down to the wood and, unsure of what to do next, gave up. A few days later, my super came by to do some repairs and, without asking, painted the wood back over in white. I had chiseled away at my prison of paint, trying to free my apartment’s premodern architecture, only to be thwarted by my landlord’s goon of goop. Perhaps he was subtly administering the medicine I so obviously needed, guarding me from the unknown: decades of deferred maintenance.

Nowadays, I’ve traded Marketplace myopia for the experiential allure of estate sales. I recently rescued a clawfoot oak dining table from a northern New Jersey house attic, only later being informed that a baby raccoon had been living under it before animal rescue showed up. I hit the residence of a recently deceased Raggedy Ann collector with a life-size doll wrapped in plastic in the basement. Closer to home, a slow stream of belongings began appearing on my Stanhope stoop: a Lucite lamp one night, a peeling portrait, a dusty dresser, a stack of plates. My downstairs neighbor had been evicted—apparently, he hadn’t paid rent for years—and had left a lifetime of possessions behind. My super, tasked with emptying his eviction estate, set the man’s worldly goods out on the sidewalk night after night—limited drops of dusktime debris for my fellow pickers.

And what did I do? As someone only slightly more rent-stabilized than my ground-floor ghost—someone building their own layered archive of urban rejectamenta, a foreshadowing of a future estate sale—I began smuggling his treasures back inside, from the dark unknown of the street, through the gray of the vestibule, to the bright white clarity of my third-floor coffin of collectibles.