Män With a Vän

Eric Rhea goes to IKEA almost every day. Voluntarily.

Photos by Luke Rafferty

There it is, that blue-and-yellow smorgasbord of particle board furniture, post-modern bedroom sets and an endless bounty of Swedish fish. It’s amazing and convenient, or cheap and annoying, but regardless, you’ve probably owned an IKEA couch or watched a movie on one at some point in your life. Supposedly, IKEA products are designed for “easy assembly.” But those of us who have spent hour upon hour trying to decipher a diagram of vague, wordless instructions, lining up half-perforated holes and securing them with screws—only to discover there are too many screws, or too few, and that the holes were not quite lined up well enough in the first place—well, we know better.

For people like us, there’s Eric Rhea. A thin, muscular man in his forties, Rhea works out and lifts weights several times a week. Still, he is not a particularly big guy. He doesn’t look like he hauls countless ready-to-assemble flat packs of heavy particleboard, wood and metal day after day afte…