Sweden has given the world many wonderful gifts. Zara Larsson, obviously. Spotify and social democracy. And Ikea, the company that showed us you can furnish your apartment, stylishly and affordably, with the contents of a few flatpack boxes.
Sweden’s talent for mass-producing clever, easy-to-assemble home fixtures also extends to something much bigger than bookshelves and bed frames: building entire houses and apartments. Ikea has become one of the biggest furniture retailers in the US (and perhaps our top purveyor of vegan meatballs). But those factory-built Swedish homes? Americans can’t have them. Yet.
In factories throughout Sweden, workers assemble modular rooms that will become components of new homes — kitchens and bathrooms, for example, complete with counters, sinks, windows, electric wiring and plumbing, and even dishwashers and washing machines. The modules are then trucked to their final destinations, hoisted up by crane, and arranged into place to form whole single-family or multifamily buildings — like a giant Lego set, as Lindbäcks, one of the country’s top manufacturers of factory-built housing, describes it. One modular development with 114 apartments was assembled on-site from its component parts in about five weeks. (Perhaps it comes as little surprise that Ikea was even a founder of one of Sweden’s prefabricated housing ventures.)
Sweden has earned a reputation as one of the world’s leaders in prefabricated, off-site housing construction. About a year ago, when I asked Joseph Gyourko, one of America’s top housing economists, which underrated housing policy stories he thinks I should write about, he had a ready answer: Look into how Nordic countries have figured out how to efficiently build high-quality homes in factories at far greater rates than the US does. “It’s not trailer parks,” he told me then. “It’s nice housing.”
