A house for Ivar, Billy, and you.

Every week, hundreds of thousands of people in 33 countries around the world head to their local Ikea superstores. There, they troll the aisles with the trademark blue-and-yellow bags, shopping for things they need for their home -- and for some things they didn't know they needed. They eat in the restaurant, let their kids play in the children's area, and when they leave, they will have spent a little over $100, whether they are Kuwaiti, Russian, Chinese or Canadian. The Ikea experience is largely the same in any one of its 231 stores worldwide.

Unless you happen to live in Sweden, Norway, Finland or Denmark. There, the one-stop home decor shop goes one step further. It will sell you not only stuff for your house, but the actual house itself. Yes, Ikea has moved into real estate. You can buy a BoKlok home in which to put your Billy bookcase and Ivar cabinet.

The BoKlok is a prefabricated home that comes in two styles: a single-family dwelling called the "villa" (only available in Sweden), and the more popular two-storey, timber-frame, L-shaped building that contains six apartments. Both are part of larger developments. Currently, BoKlok, a joint venture between the design-minded brand and the Scandinavian developer Skanska, is sold only in Scandinavia, but it will be available later this year in the U.K., where it's a partnership between Ikea, Paramount Homes and the Hyde Group. While the dwellings differ slightly depending on the country -- in Britain the bathrooms feature a tub, while in Denmark there's only a shower -- the unifying principle behind all is, in Ikea-speak, design for the masses.

"We have a price policy," says BoKlok marketing manager Ewa Magnusson, on the phone from Sweden. "The apartment should be affordable for a single nurse with a child." BoKlok homes in Sweden can cost as little as $16,000; a one-bedroom, 50-sq.-m apartment has a monthly living cost of $750. In the U.K., the flats will be marketed to families with household incomes of $30,000 to $61,000.

The product line dovetails with a modest resurgence in prefabricated housing, with a number of architects designing high-concept homes to be built in a factory. North American prefab homes, such as San Francisco architect Michelle Kaufmann's stunning Glidehouse, though, can cost more than $300,000, not including the land, making them unaffordable for Ikea's target buyer.

The public seems to love BoKlok. When the product first went on sale in Sweden, in 1996, hopeful homebuyers lined up for two days outside the Ikea store. In Norway, a development sold out within 40 minutes. Now Ikea Sweden holds lotteries for the units when a development is ready for sale. The first person to win is the first to choose an apartment. Last week in an Ikea store in Malm, Magnusson supervised a lottery in which 100 families were hoping for one of 30 spots.

BoKlok was developed by three Swedish women: an Ikea interior designer, a Skanska engineer, and a freelance architect. They created the modern, open-concept shoebox apartment unit (the comparison is Magnusson's) after their research told them customers wanted a light and airy flat in a low-rise building that had access to green space and was safe and affordable. To keep costs low and design values high, they decided to prefabricate the buildings in a factory.

While the notion of buying an Ikea home conjures images of a handy type screwing in flat-packed walls with a giant Allen key, the reality is that between 70 and 80 percent of each house is built indoors in a factory by skilled workers in an assembly-line fashion. "The kitchen is there, the wallpaper is up, the tiling, the flooring, everything is done in the factory," says Magnusson. Once the homes are completed, a transport trailer delivers what do look like giant shoeboxes, wrapped in tarp, to a suburban site, where between 12 and 100 future households are stacked and completed within four hours.

Of course, buyers must resign themselves to the fact that they have little say in the look of their homes. Just as a Dalby footstool in Saudi Arabia is indistinguishable from one in Slovakia, BoKlok homes are all identical. Unlike other developments, where the buyer is offered some design choice -- pink ceramic kitchen tiles versus blue slate, for example -- BoKlok only permits customers to decide what colour they want to paint their walls.

"That's one way we keep costs down. We do everything the same way," says Magnusson. "We've already decided what Ikea kitchen fits with the model of the house, the tiling, the oak flooring." Even the shrubbery is pre-determined, with every communal garden featuring its own Swedish apple tree. Naturally, you have a choice when it comes to furnishing your place -- though, considering all buyers are offered a free consultation with an Ikea designer as well as a $450 voucher to spend at the store, you do risk making your home a perfect Ikea model suite.

So far, Ikea has sold 2,500 homes, and its goal is to double sales by 2008. BoKlok homeowners are, according to an Ikea survey, "extremely satisfied"; 98 percent said they'd recommend BoKlok to a friend. So sales are hindered only by the cost of land. When you buy an apartment, you become a member of a co-operative and share ownership of the land. More pricey land means higher costs, so the company's strictly enforced price policy limits it from purchasing property in high-end neighbourhoods. To further protect the low price, Ikea has written the sales contract to stop speculators from buying cheap and selling high.

There are no immediate plans to import BoKlok to Canada or the U.S., even though we love Ikea -- research shows that 90 percent of Canadians in their target market know the brand. Not to mention that the prefabricated concept has some history here. At the beginning of the last century, Sears, Roebuck and Co. offered House by Mail kits that came with 30,000 pieces and an instruction manual to aid in on-site assembly.

Considering the demand for real estate in Canada that has developers gobbling up farmland and desperate home-buyers driving up house prices, it seems any new housing product could sell, particularly an affordable one. BoKlok's modern design is simple -- no Architectural Digest-style glassy expanses here -- but it reflects the Ikea aesthetic that is already so popular. If BoKlok does come to Canada, Ikea shoppers will be the best judge of whether they want to buy a home from the same place they buy duvet covers, lighting and TV stands.

PHOTO (COLOR): PREFAB PARADISE: Ikea villa in Sweden

PHOTO (COLOR): PRICE FIX: The houses are modern and meant to be affordable for a single mom

PHOTO (COLOR)

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By Sarah Elton