You throw away most of what you buy in your twenties. You buy a nice couch right around age 34. But do millennials actually care about furniture?
Anne Helen Petersen
Anne Helen Petersen
There’s a couch that’s in the backdrop of so many of my childhood photos, and if I concentrate, I can feel its texture: a bushy velvet, soft and pliant. Slate blue with white leafy fronds. It was passed down to my parents in the early ’80s, when they were living in Minneapolis, from my grandparents, who’d had it in their basement — purchased sometime in the 1950s.
When I was a toddler, my grandmother reupholstered it with the fabric I loved, stapled and sweating through the Minnesota summer while I napped. It traveled with our family when we moved to Idaho, one of our only pieces of furniture, a centerpiece of the living room. It moved to the new house we built down the street, where it became the TV room couch, home to hundreds of hours of cartoons and Star Trek: The Next Generation and MTV. My brother and I would hang upside down from it, our hair grazing the carpet, seeing how long we could last until the pounding in our heads became impossible to bear.
Sometime around 1997, its springs became discernible. It didn’t make the move to the next house. No one in my family can remember where it went, just that it didn’t end up on the curb. It was at least 40 years old.
That blue couch survived as long as it did because its framing was solid wood; whatever its stuffing was, it held on for decades, not years. My grandparents, who’d lived through the Depression and, afterward, lived with great thrift, likely purchased the couch with a mind that it would be passed down to one of their three sons. It was a fixture of their home, and it became a fixture of our home.
Many of us have stories like this from our childhoods: of items passed down and, gradually, worn out. But for our kids these types of stories will be increasingly rare: We move too much, we have less room, we don’t care nearly as much about furniture — in part because the furniture we do buy is so shitty.
Demographics bear this out: 30% of those between the ages of 20 and 29 will now spend time abroad; less than 60% of Americans now live in the same state they were born in. That may seem like a lot, but according to US Census Data, it was almost 70% in 1950. General mobility is up, in part because the time between graduation from high school or college and “settling down” is expanding: The average age of marriage has risen to 27 for women and 29 for men (in 1990, it was 23 for women and 26 for men in 1990), and the average age of motherhood has risen from 24.9 (1990) to 26.3; the average age to purchase a house has risen to age 33.
People born between 1990 and 2000 are now more than 2.4 times more likely than the average American to be paying off student loans, and have a median income of $24,973; older millennials’ median income is still just $47,854.
And then there’s the way we live: Two-thirds of millennials are renters, and in those rentals, they’re more likely to live with roommates than alone. Sixty-two percent prefer to live in “urban centers” — a dramatic shift from our parents’ generation. Only 66% of millennials under 25 own a car. When we do have money, we spend it on vacations, pay off debt, or save it — only 16% report spending excess funds on “home improvement/decorating.” The places we live are likely to be smaller and urban and shared; we have less space to fill, fewer ways to fill it, and less inclination to devote our funds to doing so.
Furniture is a signifier of taste, an indicator of both social and physical mobility, a testament to one’s stage in life. And all of those thing have changed, some of them dramatically, between our parents' generation and ours. The styles of furniture, and what’s fashionable, have always been evolving, but the sociological shift in where it fits in our lives is dramatic and telling. Simply put, we think of furniture differently — which is, in truth, a way of saying that we think about the trajectory of our lives differently.
I was born in 1981, which places me on the far end of what marketers call “old millennials” — and particularly poised to observe just how effectively the furniture revolution has transformed my life and the lives of other (middle-class) millennials. I graduated from college in 2003 and spent the next decade moving all over the place: Over my graduate career and following attempts to secure a job, I moved to Seattle, Oregon, Texas, Vermont, and back to eastern Washington state before ending up in New York.
I earned very little, surviving mostly on student loans; the furniture in my first single apartment, where I moved two years after graduation, was a mix of graduation presents (bed), flea market shabby-chic acquisitions (dresser, table, chairs), Target and Ikea (bookshelves), and hand-me-downs (a dresser, hand-stained by my mother when I was a toddler). By the time I arrived in New York, 10 years later, I’d shed every single one of these things. Most had broken — in transit, by movers, or maybe when I just looked at it funny — or been left behind when I realized that that “bookshelf” was actually just “pieces of glass with cheap metal.”
Again, this should sound familiar. Our micro-generation is sometimes called the “Ikea generation,” in part because we’re the first to graduate from college and turn so forcefully toward a single provider of furniture. This finding is borne out in a totally nonscientific survey I conducted, of 770 people of various ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, and locations. Hundreds said that their first furniture was some combination of Ikea and something else. A 24-year-old from Washington, DC, who identifies their gender as nonbinary, said, “Everyone I know in their 20s is an Ikea addict.”
The experience of a 33-year old self-identified middle-class woman, who got her first solo apartment in Seattle in 2007, was typical of the answers I received:
A mattress, a few items under $200. Other respondents received some items from their families: One woman, age 27, “inherited a lot of furniture on its last legs (old chairs, a twin-sized futon chair, my childhood bedroom set)” and “slowly built up the rest from Ikea and scrounging around”; a 26-year-old woman who first moved to Madison, Wisconsin, said, “I bought a big dresser with a mirror at a garage sale, dug my childhood desk out of my parents’ house, bought an Ikea couch and Target coffee table, and set up a kitchen table I was handed down from my cousin.”
The unifying sentiment toward the vast majority of this furniture was apathy. As a recent piece in Furniture Today explains, the Ikea generation is “the group least satisfied with their furniture — what little they have.” There’s two reasons for this. The first is practical: We move so much, and our furniture is so cheap, that it’d be foolish to overly attach ourselves (financially, psychologically) to a piece of it. When I moved, I never had enough money to pay for good, non-schemey movers; my furniture steadily acquired dings and dents; some parts were lost, others broken. An Ikea dresser fell apart; a moving company lost the frame of my futon.
In my survey, I asked people about what they lost in moves, and Ikea stuff filled the list. There was the “cool dining table from Ikea that couldn’t be reassembled,” an Ikea wardrobe that broke, a cheap Ikea coffee table that disintegrated. A 33-year-old middle-class woman who now lives in the suburbs lost two of the same Ikea dressers that I had: “Those things can’t survive moving trucks,” she said.
“A lot of what is in our homes seems very temporary — like, this piece will do for now, until I have money/a place to live for more than a year/find something better,” one 27-year-old woman from Chicago said. “I think a lot of us do want heavy, well-made objects with history, but it just doesn't quite line up with budget and life stage. Stuff kind of weighs you down, too, and that's something I think a lot of young people are looking to avoid.”
You can see that last idea — the desire to live a life unencumbered by stuff — in the popularity of the “decluttering” movement, which proselytizes the extremely bourgeois idea of pruning your possessions as a form of liberation. The thing about Ikea stuff — like Target or Walmart stuff — is that even if you keep it in your life, you could, feasibly, leave it behind at any moment: to move, to travel the world, to pursue a lead on your dream job, to follow your bliss. That attitude toward stuff is made possible, of course, by the lack of larger things weighing you down: It’s easy to be blasé about furniture when you’re delaying marriage and parenthood and home ownership, either by choice or by necessity.
