Minimalism Has a Storage Problem

IKEA's UK second-hand marketplace describes how to list used IKEA furniture and arrange collection. Leonie Cray has thought about selling some of her things. For the moment, she has settled for no longer being in the same building as them.

Her house is beautiful. On the dining table stands a shallow bowl containing a stone. The stone was chosen from several hundred others for looking as though it had been found. Everything else in the room has been removed to allow it to do that.

I ask for a glass of water. Cray says certainly. The glasses are fifteen minutes away, but someone is coming over later.

The house used to contain the usual evidence of occupation. There were books on the floor, a table that belonged to her mother, coats that did not all agree about color. Cray could see the room she wanted beneath these things. When a magazine offered to photograph it, she put them in temporary storage so the photographer could see it too.

The temporary arrangement is in its sixth year. The photographs still look current.

“We discovered we didn't need as much as we thought,” she says.

The storage unit began at eighty square feet. It has since absorbed the units on either side, then a stretch of corridor that made the shelving difficult. Initially Cray visited only when she needed something. She found a chair useful for going through boxes. A lamp made it possible to read the books she was deciding whether to bring back. Then it seemed foolish to drive home whenever she wanted tea.

She is happy to show me the unit, provided it is understood that we have finished the house tour.

There is an umbrella by the entrance. Inside, the table has the same pale ring it acquired when Cray set a hot pan on it seventeen years ago. A friend has left a scarf across one chair. On a shelf above it is a photograph that Cray likes but has never been able to make work against the living-room wall.

She puts the kettle on. There is a choice of cups, including one with a hairline crack that she always means to stop using. She gives it to herself.

A kitchen was installed after she began spending evenings here. The bathroom followed. Friends stayed late, so a guest room made sense. Her partner started leaving work clothes in a drawer. Cray sometimes wakes in the unit and has to think for a moment which direction home is.

She says the arrangement is practical. The house is easier to maintain now that they do most of their living off-site.

Even so, an empty room requires care. A receipt left on the table becomes a focal point. A cardigan on the back of a chair introduces a person who may, at any moment, want to sit down. Cray hired a curator to identify these problems before they settled in.

The curator comes on Tuesdays and Fridays. Mail goes directly to the storage unit. Flowers are removed when they begin to suggest anyone has had them for a while. The stone is turned a quarter inch according to the season, though the change should not be apparent to visitors.

Recently the curator raised an issue neither woman had anticipated. The house was producing more emptiness than it could comfortably display. Some areas had acquired a density of absence that pulled attention away from the rest of the room.

The space where the bookcase had been was especially full of not being a bookcase.

Cray didn't want to throw any of this away. The room had taken years to get right. Instead she rented a second house where the surplus could be kept until she knew what to do with it.

We stop there on the way back. The removal company has delivered the first pieces. A long silence from the original hallway stands against the stairs. Upstairs is the space between the sofa and the wall, carefully wrapped so that it won't pick up associations in transit.

Cray runs a hand along the banister. She likes the new house's proportions, but it is beginning to feel crowded. She asks the curator, by phone, whether the absence from the kitchen could perhaps be consolidated with the absence from the study. The curator says each requires room around it.

For now, nothing has been unpacked.

Back at the photographed house, a courier is waiting with the glass. It is in a padded crate because it has traveled with two other items that need to arrive unnoticed: a phone charger and a tin opener. Cray signs for all three, then looks toward the stone.

We drink our water on the doorstep. She holds the glass until the courier brings its wrapping back. I offer to carry it inside, but she says she knows where everything goes now.

Before leaving, he asks whether there will be anyone home for the next delivery of space.

Cray checks her calendar. She will be at the unit. He can leave it behind the empty planter.

Factual-versus-fiction note: IKEA's linked resale instructions are real. Leonie Cray, the homes, storage unit, curator and all events are invented. No claim about IKEA customers or policies is intended.

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