If you call IKEA furniture cardboard then you’ve clearly never bought any. I’m sure you can find stuff they sell that’s composite (I’d assume desks) but you’d have to look. Everything I have from IKEA is real wood, it’s cheap lightweight wood, but it’s wood.
IKEA’s value prop is that for the same price as places like Wayfair you get a little better quality, the stuff looks good together in a house, and it’s not offensively designed or chugey.
shudders so much faux weathered “farmhouse” garbage.
There’s literally many pieces of Ikea furniture that are made from cardboard covered in melamine sheeting. Some of it even holds up well as long as you don’t get water in it. My coffee table was $12 when I bought it 10 years ago, and it’s still fine, and it’s made literally from cardboard.
That said, Ikea has plenty of solid wood furniture, mostly of pine, and if you apply wood glue to the pegs during assembly it’s extremely durable and long lasting for it’s price. I have a dresser from Ikea that was “stain yourself”. I assembled and sealed it when I was 14. I’m almost 40, and it’s still in fantastic condition.
"Lack" coffee tables are actually made out of cardboard, with acrylic coating and some particle board in the critical spots. You can actually punch right through one of those tables quite easily if you try, but for static loads the honeycomb cardboard filling is extremely strong, to the point that you can stand on top of it.
The poster above you called it chipboard, not cardboard, but I've always called it cardboard myself. And I consider myself something of an IKEA fan. IKEA doesn't even hide this - they've put up cross-sections of their furniture before and you can see that it is a veneer over what is essentially cardboard. That said, it seems to work quite well. It's far from heirloom quality furniture, but it does the job, and I completely agree with you that it's strength is a unified design that makes it easy to mix/match in your house and come up with a nice, modern look for a quite affordable price.
Only the absolutely cheapest stuff is structural cardboard or particle board or MDF. One exception is probably the PAX series of wardrobe/closet system, which is relatively expensive though it's veneered particle board. The kitchen cabinets are also MDF, but relatively cheap. Definitely cheaper than most competing modular systems (that tend to also be MDF these days).
Their kitchen cabinets are definitely veneered particle board, it’s rather heavy weight and good quality particle board though, it’s comparable to quality-MDF in weight.
Ikea Lack tables (the 10$ 50x50cm ones everyone has) are literally cardboard laid on its side between two panels of laminate. This is standard for ikea stuff.
Some of it is chipboard with veneer, and the rest is massive but cheapo soft wood like pine (and that’s the “luxury” bracket in IKEAs offering, the most expensive in the store.
IKEA’s value prop is that for the same price as places like Wayfair you get a little better quality, the stuff looks good together in a house, and it’s not offensively designed or chugey.
shudders so much faux weathered “farmhouse” garbage.