Use of English PRO

There is no mistaking the Ikea Museum. The room sets for each decade are arranged inside giant cardboard boxes. One glass cabinet is dedicated to a single meatball on a fork. Another displays a humble Allen key, giver of life to flat-pack furniture.
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All the furnishing heroes of the company's 73-year history are here. There is a black leather Klippan sofa from 1984, just five years after the bestselling couch was launched - initially to a lukewarm response. There is a Poem chair from 1977, with its gracefully bent wooden arms - it would later become the much-loved Poang - and the Bra wardrobe and those stalwarts of small storage solutions, the Moppe plywood boxes.
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Ikea has undoubtedly contributed to the evolution of furniture design, not only by tapping into a classic Scandinavian ethos of clean line, and unity of form and function, all while maintaining low prices, but also in its search for cheaper and, in recent years, more sustainable materials. The Moment table, from the 1980s, for instance, has bent metal legs inspired by shopping trolleys.
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Not everything works, but the museum charts even the company's failures with an air of pragmatism and pride. As museums go, Ikea's is fairly introspective. It's a bit like being stuck inside any Ikea. There is just too much stuff from Ikea. More exploration of the brand's interaction with the larger world of design would be welcome.
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Ikea's headquarters are also here in the quiet town of Almhult; many of the 9,000 residents have a working connection to the chain. On campus, the blend of precision and sprawl is familiar from any of the company's stores.
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Ikea here is a kind of faith, a belief system. Take Cia Eriksson. She fell in love with Ikea when her parents took her on a spree to the Malmo store for her 10th birthday. More than 30 years on, she can still list her haul that day: Tura, a desk in white, a white bedframe with lots of cushions, curtains, a Billy bookcase. When her dream came true, and she joined the company in 1986, she bought two Klippan sofas, still going strong in her lounge, though she has changed their covers at least 15 times. The museum's curator, Sofie Bergkvist, acquired her first pieces at around the same time. She remembers a stool in the shape of a flower. It sounds as if, between them, they could almost assemble a museum from their own belongings. Actually, Eriksson says, it was pretty hard tracking down all the pieces. The Ikea archive held only 20 percent of the exhibits they wanted to include. Everything else had to be bought  a labour that took their colleague Thea Davidsson two-and-a- half years.
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The first thing she did was to map chairs, tables, lamps and so on, creating a folder of images for each one, of every article Ikea had ever made. Then she set about scouring eBay, Tradera (a Swedish auction site) and flea markets.
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"A boring carpet from the 80s," Davidsson says with a shrug - you can tell she hasn't worked for Ikea for long. She had to make the five-hour drive to Stockholm to tick that one off the list. Some items were still in their boxes, flat-packs intact. It's bizarre to think of Ikea buying back its furniture and self-assembling them for posterity. But at least most finds came cheaply. When Davidsson used to work at an auction house, Ikea furniture and accessories never came up. They didn't even accept them. But over the past year, that has begun to change. Now He sees Ikea things on auction sites all the time. Sweden, she thinks, is learning to appreciate its design achievements.