Ikea store features replica of Syrian home

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Ikea's flagship store in Norway has displayed a replica of a Syrian home as a gesture of solidarity with those displaced by the conflict.

Customers at the Swedish homeware giant will be familiar with its idiosyncratic layout, in which shoppers are guided by arrows around a series of showrooms featuring Ikea furniture and fittings.

However, alongside the gleaming displays of model kitchens and bedrooms, visitors to the Ikea store in Slependen, Norway, were greeted with a jarring contrast last month – a bleak recreation of the temporary homes where many Syrians caught up in the civil war are forced to take shelter.

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"The mock-apartment features hard, cinder block walls, scant furnishings and few usable appliances," all of which are labelled with Ikea-style price tags, Design Boom reports. However, rather than the cost of the item, the tags contain snippets of refugees' accounts of life in Syria.

The installation, developed by Ikea in partnership with the Red Cross, is a replica of a real home, belonging to a woman called Rana who lives in a 270sq-ft apartment outside Damascus with her four children.

"We wanted the apartment to be as close to reality as we could because this is real," Maja Folgero, who works for creative agency POL, which was behind the mock-up, told CNN. "People live like this."

"At the one place where you think of and plan the future, the apartment served as a physical reminder of how lucky we are."

The installation was intended to promote Norway's annual charity telethon TV-Aksjonen, which this year raised more than 220 million kroner (£22m) for the Red Cross.