House of the Week lights up with Ikea

You may think that Ikea does not feature often in designer homes, think again. Take a peek into Chris and Linda’s magazine-perfect home and see how Ikea hangs comfortably with the best of them.

Chris says, “Ikea is throughout our new Seattle-area home, the House of the Week in the 2/3/08 edition of Pacific NW Magazine. We have an attached granny unit with a kitchen and bath totally in Ikea cabinets, dining lamp in same unit, a Varde-cabinet laundry room, stainless steel cabinet handles and stainless steel shelves in main kitchen and wet bar, 36 linear feet Pax built-ins (and two chest-of-drawers) in the walk-through master closet, stainless steel cabinet pulls in another bath and media room, a pendant light in the media room, a full-wall perforated metal shelf / computer workstation in the den / guest room, and a mirror and two wall lights in the powder room.

The big ‘hack’, though, is the way that six track lighting systems are installed in five rooms of the house. Rather than spending $40 per articulated rod for the 20 rods ($800) needed to suspend the tracks from the sloping ceilings, I showed the electricians the Ikea stainless steel Deka curtain-wire system and gave them directions on how to adapt it to suspend the tracks. It took 33 of these ‘kits’ at $4.00 each ($132) for the job.

It wasn’t just a matter of cost savings. Our industrial-modern house has a lot of design elements and didn’t need the addition of 20 black rods in the overhead space. The curtain-wires are nearly invisible . . . the tracks seem to float in space. We will soon use the same components to suspend glass shelves in a display cabinet in the entry.”