I grew up in Nottingham in the 1990s. The furniture in our house was inherited, mismatched, or came from one of those catalogue shops that no longer exist. Nobody talked about interior design. Nobody talked about clean lines or functional beauty or Scandinavian minimalism. The idea that a regular family might have opinions about how their living room looked, beyond "it works," would have seemed ridiculous.

Then IKEA arrived. And quietly, without anyone noticing it happening in real time, it changed what an entire generation expected from the spaces they lived in.

This is not a post about flat-pack furniture. It is a post about how taste gets transmitted. Because IKEA might be the most influential design company in the world, and almost nobody calls it a design company.

Before IKEA: the taste gap

For most of the twentieth century, good design was expensive. If you wanted a well-designed chair, you bought from a design house. If you wanted a considered living space, you hired someone. The aesthetics of daily life were divided along clear economic lines: wealthy people had beautiful things, everyone else had functional things, and the gap between the two was enormous and largely invisible. You didn't know what you were missing because you'd never been exposed to the alternative.

This was the taste gap. Not a gap in people's ability to appreciate good design, but a gap in access to it. Most people had perfectly good taste. They just couldn't afford to express it. The raw materials of considered living were locked behind a price point that excluded almost everyone.

IKEA didn't just sell furniture. It sold the idea that your home should look like something you chose, not something that happened to you. That distinction changed everything.

IKEA closed that gap. Not by making luxury cheaper, but by making good design the default. When you walked into an IKEA store, you didn't see a warehouse of cheap furniture. You saw rooms. Complete, considered, styled rooms that showed you what a well-designed space could look like. The showrooms were the product just as much as the furniture was. They were taste, made tangible, laid out in a path you could walk through.

The accidental design education

Here is the thing about IKEA that most people miss: the store is a school. Every time you walk through those showrooms, you are receiving a design education. You are learning about proportion, about colour coordination, about how light interacts with space, about the difference between cluttered and curated. You are learning that a bookshelf can be beautiful. That storage can be considered. That a lamp is not just a lamp but a choice.

None of this is accidental. IKEA's design philosophy is rooted in Democratic Design, a framework built on five dimensions: form, function, quality, sustainability, and low price. The genius of this framework is that it puts form first. Not as a luxury add-on, not as something you get if you pay more, but as a fundamental requirement at every price point. A three-pound shelf should be as considered as a three-hundred-pound sofa. That principle is radical, even if it doesn't feel like it anymore.

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The IKEA effect on expectations: Before IKEA, people expected furniture to be functional. After IKEA, people expected furniture to be both functional and beautiful. That shift in baseline expectation is the single biggest change in mass-market design in the last fifty years.

And it didn't feel like education. That's important. IKEA never lectured you about Scandinavian design principles. It never made you feel like you needed to understand Alvar Aalto or Dieter Rams to deserve a nice bookcase. It just showed you what good design looked like, priced it so you could afford it, and trusted you to make the connection. The education was embedded in the experience. You absorbed it without knowing you were absorbing it.

Taste is learned, not inherited

There is a persistent myth that taste is innate. That some people are born with an eye for design and others are not. That it is a fixed trait, like height or eye colour, distributed unevenly and unchangeably. This is nonsense, and IKEA proves it.

Millions of people walked into IKEA stores with no particular design sensibility and walked out with opinions about lamp shades. They went in thinking a table is a table and came out understanding that some tables feel better than others, not because of the material or the price, but because of the proportion, the line, the intention behind the design. Their taste was not awakened. It was built. Piece by piece, showroom by showroom, BILLY bookcase by BILLY bookcase.

There is a persistent myth that taste is innate. IKEA proves otherwise. Millions of people walked into those showrooms with no design sensibility and walked out with opinions about lamp shades. Taste is learned. Full stop.

This matters because it extends far beyond furniture. If taste can be learned through exposure, then every brand that creates considered experiences is, whether it intends to or not, teaching people what to expect. Apple taught people to expect intuitive interfaces. Spotify taught people to expect personalised discovery. Netflix taught people to expect on-demand everything. Each of these companies raised the baseline of expectation in their category, just as IKEA did in furniture. And once the baseline moves up, it never moves back down.

The IKEA paradox

There is an irony at the heart of this story. IKEA democratised taste so successfully that it created its own backlash. Once everyone had the same clean-lined, light-wood, Scandinavian-inflected living room, the design-literate needed to distinguish themselves again. The MALM bed became a meme. The KALLAX shelf became a signifier of conformity. Having IKEA furniture went from being a sign of taste to being a sign of the absence of it.

But this misses the point entirely. The backlash only exists because IKEA raised expectations in the first place. The person who now rejects IKEA in favour of vintage mid-century furniture or handmade ceramics is exercising a design sensibility that was very likely shaped by IKEA. You have to learn the rules before you can break them. You have to understand clean lines before you can appreciate deliberate maximalism. IKEA was the foundation, even for the people who think they've moved past it.

What this means for brands

I think about this a lot in my work. The lesson from IKEA is not about flat-pack furniture or Swedish meatballs. It is about the power of making taste accessible. The brands that endure are the ones that don't just sell products but shift expectations. They make people want more from their category, from their environment, from their daily experiences.

This is what I mean when I talk about taste as strategy. It is not about having the most beautiful product. It is about raising the floor. It is about making your audience expect more from everything, and being the brand that taught them to expect it. IKEA did not position itself as a design brand. It positioned itself as an affordable furniture company. But the design was the strategy all along, embedded in every showroom, every product, every three-pound shelf that could have been ugly but wasn't.

Taste can be taught. Not through lectures or manifestos or brand guidelines, but through experience. Through exposure. Through walking into a room and feeling, without quite being able to articulate why, that everything in it is right. IKEA built that room for a billion people. And whether they realise it or not, they have been living in its influence ever since.