Home Interiors: Why Ikea's Billy bookcase is forever young
Versatility has always been the Billy's strong suit, and here it delivers as a gorgeous headboard in a biomorphic bit of calm, set dressing.
It is estimated, using Ikea's own retail analysis, that every five seconds a Billy bookcase is sold somewhere in the world. A staple of the Viking-style hangar, flat-pack since 1979, 120 million of the bookcases or their remains, are scattered across the planet.
Fondly dubbed over 40 years ago as a winning “Pocketpriser” (pocket-friendly product), product design developer for Ikea, Bonnie Yu remarks, “We talk about Billy being 40 years old, but Billy isn’t old to us. It’s a dear friend that is forever young. It used to have a CD tower.”
From the start, Billy proved to be a bit of a quiet shape-shifter. It was designed primarily to carry books but is used as readily for decorative gee-gaw as tomes these days. In response to the decline in the curating of paperbacks, d eeper Billy shelves slipped into production in 2011.
Well, whatever your ballast, there is big news for Billy devotees. The kid will be re-launched in a fresh new face and detailing by Ikea in January 2024, shelving what the firm has presented as sustainability issues with their beloved old storage star.
Icon or economical cop-out for dull and/or overwhelmed decorator, Billy’s a safe, sturdy response to the look, if not the hefty reality, of the classic built-in bookcase, bespoke and properly, made-to-measure. Hacked, banked up, used as everything from head-boards to room dividers, the Billy has a reverent following for its Scandi-chic pared-back talents.
Its major deterrent for green-minded buyers on a budget was possibly the particle-board core under the real wood veneer. However, this actually never included dodgy solvents, formaldehyde or PVC in the production.
The dust and waste created during the making of the piece was burned in the company’s own heating furnace or at other plants, according to an environmental audit by The Materials Innovation Centre at OCAD University in Toronto. It adds to its lifecycle analysis that this wonder of the bedsit and noble hall “is made on a single line, and no human hand ever touches the shelf until you, as a customer, unpacks it at home.”
The wood pallets Billy boxes once rode on have now been replaced by Ikea's cardboard pallets, further reducing the wood needed to deliver the bookcases to each customer off the production line.
Popular in an innocent, but highly architectural white (already an inexpensive melamine foil rather than a wood veneer), Billy is still not regarded by Ikea as its towering sustainable moment, and it was determined to do something about it. The firm as always had a reputation for accepting its planetary failings and responsibilities head-on and has introduced the new Billy as part of its circulatory approach including its buy-pay programs.
I wonder if a materials shortage caused by the crisis in Ukraine is not at play here too. It explains in its Billy press release: " By shifting from veneer to paper foil, reducing plastic use, and making it possible to disassemble and reassemble, Ikea aims for Billy to continue to be an important part of people’s homes for many more years to come.”
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So, not only is your Billy '24, stepping more lightly on the Earth according to Ikea, but it can be pulled apart without compromising its survival, and trot off with you wherever you go. What has gone, and it won’t please everyone, is the real wood veneer under an acrylic lacquer in the coloured Billy cases, previously sourced in largely FSC forests, including (tantalisingly) — Russian forests.
Bonnie Yu explains: “ For many years, we’ve worked with wood veneer. But natural resources have become more and more scarce. Shifting to paper foil, we’re using already mass-produced and less scarce material. We harvest fewer trees, while customers will see the product looking better with a more competitive price.”
Growing up surrounded by soaring canyons of synthetic, black beauty-board rippling with printed grain, clinging to every wall, even the real wood veneer of Billy read too thin and widely recognizable for my liking. That said, the simplicity of the design, like that of String, Elfa, 606 Universal Shelving (Vitsoe) and Ikea’s own Algot, really does offer us something to trick out in your own unique way.
The shelving can carry books, dishes or 18th-century Delft with equal flair. With good modular, box shelving like Billy, it’s all about the content, not the shelf, which visually recedes out of the way, while framing up your collections. Who knows what may happen to other Ikea classics, including the Billy sibling, Hemnes in solid pine.
Ensuring its potential longevity from the line to the landfill, The ease of dis- and re-assemblage is something Ikea and other mass manufacturers of flat-pack furnishings have seized on in recent years. However nerve-munching it is to address a pile of panelled veneered furnishings with an Allen key and an exploded diagram, taking the blasted things apart was equally as taxing, often leading to mortal damage (not just to the bookcase).
With some minute, and invisible changes including snap fittings, Billy’s bought from 2024 will be slipped apart and reconfigured or moved in handy pieces house-to-house, willed on, or taken to rebuild and add some character and perching roof in rented or student digs. The edges (vulnerable to chipping) will be wrapped in paper, rather than plastic. We’ll have to see how they stand up in the coming years of use.
Colour expressions, will match better with other faux-timber colours and finishes in Ikea's other ranges. black oak, dark brown oak, brown walnut, oak, and birch. The Oxberg door series which allowed the Billy to be composed with open and blind storage for just about any situation will be re-launched with the same material and colour updates.
The assembly instructions for the new Billy have a section detailing the appropriate disassembly of the product, with the new nail-free back panel set to snap in and out of place more easily. If you like the Billy as is, with the wood veneer and plastic edge support, you have 18 months to get online or drag a trailer up to Tallaght.
The new Billy collection will launch in Ireland in January 2024; ikea.ie.
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