It's a truth universally acknowledged that IKEA is a homeware lover's dream. Many flock there for the £1 bags of tealights, the marketplace, and basically everything in the IKEA cafe.
But even more pleasurable than a trip to the store is a quick flick through the IKEA catalogue. It gives us plenty of inspiration (plus an idea of how our homes could look if we decided to paint everything white and get rid of all our belongings).
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However, The Huffington Post and CG Society have discovered something pretty surprising about the IKEA catalogue, with it's impossibly chic scenes of Swedish families reclining on grey sofas and pottering about a small, but very well laid out kitchen.
They're actually not real.
Yep, 75% of the photos in its catalogue are actually CGI, meaning they've been created digitally on a computer rather than a cool interiors shoot.
However, it's all for a good cause - IKEA says that this method, while a bit unexpected, is more efficient and eco-friendly, because they don't have to build and then destroy sets of furniture.
'The most expensive and complicated things we have to create and shoot are kitchens,' Martin Enthed, an IKEA IT manager, told CG Society.
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'From both an environmental and time point of view, we don't want to have to ship in all those white-goods from everywhere, shoot them and then ship them all back again. And unfortunately, kitchens are one of those rooms that differ very much depending on where you are in the world. A kitchen in the US will look very different to a kitchen in Japan, for example, or in Germany. So you need lots of different layouts in order to localise the kitchen area in brochures.'
h/t Huffington Post and CG Society. From Cosmo. Images: Instagram/Ikea
