A big beautiful blue box in North Jersey that you could see from the highway. “IKEA” spelled out, luminous in gold. It was a special chance to stop there and rare for us to have a vehicle big enough to hold a substantial piece of apartment furniture, flattened as it may have been in its Scandinavian shipping box. For many Manhattanites, it wasn’t a car but a special shuttle from midtown that brought them for hunting and gathering as a pack, returning then to figure out how to stuff their prizes into tiny elevators and up narrow hallways.

Ingvar Kamprad died at the beginning of this year. He was the Swedish visionary who assembled the furniture store Ikea from almost nothing. Its components arose from just plain ingenuity and with persistence and, we can assume, an Allen wrench. His obituary seemed to emphasize a moral agenda of frugality, but it seems to me he taught us something about taking care of ourselves and our capacity for world-building.

If frugality is about containing our instincts, then I took a very different message from that store. Abundance, attainability, and freedom. A picture of being young, poor, constructive, and stylish all at the same time.

I mourned his passing, as much as I celebrated the passing of my appetite for any of his products a decade ago, in my own development into adulthood.

Ikea seemed to appear in America right at the moment that those of us in Generation X were making our first nests. For many of us suburban kids, getting our first apartment in the city meant finding tiny, tidy bits of stylish furniture which we could afford and carry up the stairs.

Once upon a time, lives were launched with the heavy pieces of furniture passed on with care from deceased or downsizing relatives. I’ve read that it has become impossible to give away much less sell the precious 200 lb china cabinets of generations past. Better to have a FABRIKÖR cabinet for less than 200 dollars. I don’t know what FABRIKÖR means, but somehow it matches my personality more than great Aunt Rose’s mahogany behemoth. And who has china anyway to put in such a cabinet?

Ikea was not ever really about good furniture, but as is the appropriate bar in many things, good enough furniture. Always adequate. It could be the business slogan of the company. Always adequate and forever flat. Flattened in the box for delivery meant assembly would be required. And although I am not good at assembling anything, and though the thought of it alone leaves me distressed, I married a woman who could build anything, and has the patience to do it.

In my greatest Ikea adventure, we acquired a beautiful object called a Jerker. It was a desk, but more than a desk. It was a metal scaffold of a deal to which myriad arms, extensors, and platforms could be attached to enhance one’s productivity and ergonomic feng shui. It appealed to any of us who ever had an erector set. It seemed spartan and decadent at the same time. Masculine and serious. Functional and frivolous. It was a delight like nothing else.

Over time and through many moves, parts of the Jerker were lost, an appendage here or there, a dozen bolts. And yet somehow this did not really degrade or destroy the Jerker; it seemed to always have extra to spare. With no specific prescribed form, a piece or two gone always left an adequate residual. Reassembled by a team of Japanese movers contracted for an overseas move, it arrived in a form somewhat astray from its original design, but nonetheless, the Jerker persisted.

Now in middle age, there is little if any remnant of that beautiful Jerker (other than a small packet of screws in my toolbox) or other Ikea artifacts in my home. But whenever I think of Ikea, I think of my good fortune on a number of different levels. First the blessing of family, and then the blessing of relative wealth. I realize that I had enough of each to make my own space piece by piece. I realize now that in its extravagant accessibility, what Mr. Kamprad gave us was not a way to live cheaply, to be less, but a way to live constructively and so to become more. It gives me hope that business innovation done right isn’t just about selling us stuff, but giving us something to buy into, that might just make us for the better.