For two weeks in October 2016, the Swedish retailer built a concrete 25 square-metre replica of a real Syrian family’s home – almost totally bare except for some rugs and meager furnishings – inside IKEA Slependen, its Norway flagship.
The objective? To give customers a taste of what life’s like for Rana, a mum of four young kids who lives in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in war-torn Damascus, re-creating the atmosphere for a Western audience.
Price tags adorned the walls of the room, but rather than selling anything, the papers contained information on the horrors Syrians have experienced since war enveloped their lives. Some of the papers equally served as donation slips.
