- The Guardian,
- Wednesday February 2 2005
Young house-hunters trying to grab the first rung on the property ladder are about to face a new challenge to add to the headaches of finding a mortgage and somewhere more roomy than a shoebox to live.
From this spring, if an Anglo-Swedish project takes off, it will be possible to buy an entire home from the furnishing superstore Ikea with the option - though this would be the hard part - of following the flatpack instructions and assembling it yourself.
Shoppers familiar with the unique Ikea system may blanch at the prospect, but the store is preparing the package to sell to customers with incomes as modest as £15,000. Provided they are handy with Allen keys, Phillips screwdrivers and pliers, they will have a simple open-plan, one-bedroom apartment plus a voucher, probably for £250, to buy a "start package" of Ikea furniture.
Most of the homes are expected to come in ready-assembled clusters of six, however, through a deal with the Hyde housing association, Paramount Homes and Ikea's Scandinavian partner Skanska. Known as BoKloks in the store's grand tradition of calling shelves Gorm and storage bags Plutt, the houses are currently scouting for sites, with the first likely on the fringes of London, Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.
The initiative, which would see each new home valued at around £70,000, is the biggest commercial response yet to the deputy prime minister John Prescott's challenge to builders to come up with a cut-price "instant home" to break the first-time buying gridlock. This week, an Irish-designed flatpack of insulated steel and cedar cladding, valued at £60,000, was erected at the sustainable cities conference in Manchester.
Ikea and Hyde would say lit tle yesterday, promising more details of the British launch at the end of the month. However, the store emailed details of more than 1,400 BoKloks de-flatpacked and up and running on 45 sites in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
The homes were invented in 1997 in response to similar housing problems in Sweden, where Ikea shaved the basic cost of a home in the way it has done for humbler objects like the Jerker cupboard and Gassbo stool. Costly but "unnecessary" house details were cut out after an exhaustive survey of what young house-hunters considered essential, as opposed to ideal.
The BoKloks will available over the counter at Ikea's 13 British stores if all goes well, with between three and seven blocks of six per site, plus communal gardens and car parking. The package may also include advice and support in setting up a new home, a personal shopper, mortgage and insurance discounts and a year's interest-free loans on large purchases of items like the Plutt and Gorm.
