IKEA – Part III – THE PRESENTATION

Arriving at the Lennar district office we are so excited!  Sam and I can’t wait to present the furnishings and colors for the two IKEA models to Lennar and get the reaction from the division president Brock Nicholas and his team. Sam is cautious because, after all, design is subjective. I think Lennar is going to love it.  The amazing designers at Beasley & Henley pulled it off perfectly!

We set up in the conference room and wait. We love working for Lennar, but they do tend to run late…Once the group is assembled the tension in the room is palpable. It takes nearly two hours to go through everything in each home but Lennar loves the selections, the colors and styling of each home’s IKEA decor. We are psyched!

Packing it all up we eagerly let them know we are ready to order and start the process.

Well not so fast, says Lennar. They want to send our furnishings and color presentations to IKEA directly to get their blessing on our work.

AHHH!  That’s even more daunting that a client presentation!  We have to present IKEA to IKEA? Yeah, no stress there.

Adding to that, the regional IKEA representative wants to look at the presentation digitally AND he also wants to come in to our design studio to talk about all the pieces we have selected  If you are a designer reading this, then you there are some conflicting emotions there, but hey, we are team players and we welcome him in with open arms and cautious smiles.

Mr. Regional Ikea is a nice guy and he likes what he sees, but then he turns to me and asks what seems to be a trick question. “What theme are you going for in each of the houses?” Theme, really? Isn’t that kind of obvious?  I try to eliminate the possible sarcasm from my answer and say, ‘Well it’s the IKEA theme’.

Sometimes I think I’m so smart. But, it turns out this wasn’t one of those times.  Turns out that IKEA has four themes in their line.  I know, who knew?  They are the Scandinavian Traditional, Scandinavian Modern, Popular Modern and Popular Traditional. Well, we just threw caution to the wind and indiscriminately mixed them all together. Sorry IKEA. We keep things a little bit looser around here, and when furnishings flow so well together we just go with it and create great combinations of livable spaces for homeowners.Well, we did something right because in the end IKEA emailed back and said they were fine with our crazy IKEA mix. We have their blessing! We are all ready to go!