IKEA and the City

For many people across the world, their home is a sense of pride.  Parties are thrown in honor of a finished kitchen.  "Look, we have new lights! Isn't it fantastic?" And so it is the same in Paris, where throngs of Parisians flock to the tony home decor boutiques in the city and the outlying bricolage centers to shop for tiles, rugs, kitchen sinks and rainfall shower heads to make their cozy little apartments in the Ile de France très fantaisie.  And this is Paris, where art of design is at the center of living, and so they take it all very seriously.

So I couldn't have been more excited to journey out to the fringes of Paris to the Ikea Paris Nord, adjacent to CDG, for a very familiar home deco shopping experience (and hopefully the same Swedish meatballs) with a distinctive French influence.  But instead of arriving in my Jeep Liberty, ready to be loaded with all types of necessary items to complete an apartment renovation, we were arriving by scooter.  All of a sudden, the shopping list was limited to exactly what we could pack in the top case.  And so it goes with every shopping experience in the city where a car is viewed as a ridiculous excess.

Shopping for lighting ideas at Fleux in Le Marais

We were not alone in our venture; several other scooters stood parked just outside the entrance, many equipped with the standard cases on top and at the sides, ready to be stuffed to the brim with hjalts  and tallviks and other exotic sounding household items.  And so with numb fingers and helmut hair, we folded into the pack of DIYers and started down the Ikea maze.  After about 4 hours of examining all the different showrooms and discussing the benefits of this rug color over that, and which canapé would be arriving to the apartment shortly, we arrived at the marché de l'éclairage. And actually, it was kind of exciting to be picking out new lighting systems for the kitchen, living rooms, the bedroom.  But what was even more exciting was that we got it all to fit on the scooter, and soon we were zooming back to Paris with new suspension lamps for the cuisine.  They won't be up until after the room has been painted, but believe me, when they're installed, I can't wait to have a party to show them off.