As the world's largest furniture retailer, Ikea attracts plenty of detractors. Many like to highlight the impossibility of ever being able to assemble a house full of funky Swedish furniture using something that looks like an engine part that has fallen off your neighbour's Datsun 120Y.

For those who think building your own furniture is déclassé, the Allen key is to Ikea what that the two-pronged yellow brick is to a Lego pack: a piece so innocuous that a novice is likely to discard or lose it, thereby condemning the whole project.

But I get the store's enduring popularity. For whenever I flick through an Ikea catalogue, I'm overcome by a rush of hope that here lies redemption from my family's cluttered and chaotic domestic life. In contrast to the foot traffic within Ikea, there are strikingly few people featured in the groovy rooms of its catalogue. Perhaps Mum and Dad are yet to return from the couples therapy they entered after Dad lost the Allen key at a critical stage in the assembly of the Schloosenbraat entertainment unit, which Mum had bought despite knowing he preferred the Flaarten.

Maybe the kids are in that tiny crawl space under the stairs, measuring up the spare centimetres where the Akartlengschtaart will hold all the toys, shoes, hiking gear and pet accessories for generations to come. Or has the entire family finally worked out how to file itself out of sight in the calming Muurflapt storage unit?

But the catalogue text occasionally gives the mirage away: "Two sofas, back to back, can create calm little islands for 30-minute everyday holidays." Except in our house, where two sofas back to back means someone can't see the TV, creating 30 minutes of Armageddon during SpongeBob SquarePants.