IKEA is genuinely good at what it does. The catalogue logic is coherent, the pricing is honest, the flat-pack system is an engineering achievement. None of this is in dispute. The problem is not IKEA. It is what happens when IKEA becomes the default answer to every furnishing question, including the ones it was never designed to answer.
The model works by inverting the usual relationship between a space and its furniture. Normally, a piece is designed around a room's specific dimensions, the habits of the people in it, where the light falls, what the walls can take, how the family moves through the space at different times of day. IKEA works the other way: you find the piece that comes closest to what you need, then you adjust your space, and your expectations, to fit it. You leave a gap on one side because the unit is 80cm wide and the alcove is 94. You choose the shelving height that is available, not the one that is right. You move around the furniture rather than the furniture moving around you.
This is a reasonable trade-off for a rented apartment, a first home, or a space that is going to change in two years. It is a poor trade-off for a room you intend to inhabit seriously.
The conformity question
There is a second issue, less structural and more cumulative. When the same catalogue serves millions of homes, the visual language of those homes converges. The Billy bookcase has been in continuous production since 1979. The Kallax is in enough living rooms across enough cities that encountering it no longer registers as a design choice. It registers as a default. This is not a criticism of the people who own these pieces. It is an observation about what happens to a space when its furniture carries no particular relationship to the people living in it.
A piece made for a specific brief (a specific corner, a specific habit, a specific material preference) does not look like anyone else's piece. It cannot, because the brief was particular. The Pebble Shoerack at Druvtara, for instance, exists because a client needed entry storage that could also seat a child putting on shoes and a parent tying laces beside them. No catalogue contains that piece, because no catalogue knows that brief.
The question to ask of any piece of furniture is not whether it fits in the room. It is whether it fits the life being lived in it. IKEA, at its best, answers the first question well. It rarely touches the second.