There’s a popular idea among some design enthusiasts that we should all, at some point, outgrow IKEA.


Offering easily accessible, low-cost contemporary flat-pack furniture, the Swedish retailer meets certain needs that are common among young people. Theoretically, those of us who rely on IKEA to furnish our homes at a young age would eventually reach a point in our lives where we have more money to spend on higher-quality furniture and be ready to upgrade.


Of course, that’s not always true. IKEA is wildly popular among all sorts of demographics around the world for good reasons, not the least of which is its budget-friendliness. But furniture company FLOYD, which is often described as “furniture for the post-IKEA set,” actually does present a strong argument for taking basic IKEA concepts and elevating them to a new level. They do it for the sake of reducing waste.






“Floyd began because we were tired of disposable furniture,” the company explains. “So we set out to design products of lasting quality for how people live today. Furniture should be made for the home, not the landfill. Made with materials that last. It’s a different way of making furniture. We call it furniture for keeping.”


In that spirit, Floyd recently added a new product to its lineup of intelligently simple furniture. “The Shelf” is a modular minimalist system consisting of solid birch plywood and ash wood supports, a few fixed metal shelves, and additional adjustable metal shelves. It comes in three colors and three sizes: tall, short, and wardrobe.


Designing your own custom configuration is a breeze, as is snapping the powder-coated steel shelves into the supports and anchoring the unit to the wall with velcro. You can purchase a “base shelf” set and then get shelf add-ons to expand it, too. Even better, assembly takes twenty minutes or less.




“In order to ensure top safety and stability, we put our shelving system through stringent testing, and it passed flawlessly! For the shelving system, we even designed some of our own hardware, to make assembly and securing the shelf to the wall as easy as can be. Add-on a display shelf to show off some of your favorite books and records, or transform a shelf into some extra closet space with the wardrobe add-on.”


Other offerings from Floyd take a similar approach, including a sofa, bed, tables, and lighting. All of them are flat-pack, lightweight, and easy to put together, perfect for millennials or anyone else who has to move fairly frequently. But they don’t compromise on quality when it comes to materials and construction.




Naturally, the prices reflect that durability, generally ranging several times as much as similar-looking offerings by IKEA and other retailers. But disposability is a big problem, and if you’re able to invest in pieces that will last decades instead of just a few years, you’ll be doing the planet a big favor (and the furniture will essentially pay for itself over time).


If you aren’t yet familiar with Floyd and want to see their furniture up close, you should check out the company’s interesting partnership with AirBnB. They’ve chosen select rental homes and apartments in places like Palm Desert, Portland, Los Angeles, the Catskills, and Toronto and outfitted them entirely in Floyd furniture.