Domestic Matters: IKEA Catalogues, the Good Home and the Changing Aspirations of Urban Chinese

Taking IKEA catalogues from 2010 to 2017 as the objects of analysis, this chapter examines how this global furniture retailer constructs the ideal homes that offer Chinese consumers aspirations for good homes and good lives, and their cultural implications. We argue that IKEA’s popularity in China is attributed to a ‘cultural odourlessness’, which, for its ease in travelling globally, has also become an odour in itself in the Chinese context. In its global circulation, IKEA’s transcultural odourlessness attracts – rather than rejects – diverse translocal experiences of different places and therefore powerfully enriches and pluralises senses of place. IKEA exemplifies how transcultural flows de-territorialise and re-territorialise home, endlessly pluralising senses of home.