Australian Ikea Store Builds A Playroom For Men Where Wives Can Drop Their Husbands While They Go Shop

By Sarah Firshein

An Ikea store in Sydney, Australia, has either set retail shopping forward by three decades or set gender equality back by three decades—you decide: they're testing out Manland, which is, as one local newscaster describes it, "basically a creche for husbands and boyfriends with short retail attention spans, a place to hang out while their wives and girlfriends run the aisles of Ikea."

Think ultimate man-cave stuff such as video games, foosball tables, free hot dogs, pinball machines, and oddly enough, no books. (Apparently reading is not encouraged in Manland!) As with Ikea's childcare creche, women dropping off their husbands and boyfriends are given a buzzer. "After 30 minutes, the buzzer goes off, it reminds you that you have to come pick up your man or else, you know, we may have to all the authorities," explains one Ikea sales associate.

Clearly there are a number of loopholes in this whole program, not the least being the fact that it overlooks gay couples. And secondly, when is 30 minutes ever enough time to successfully navigate an Ikea.

This post originally appeared at Curbed.

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Montana Couple builds “Hobbit House”

by Mark R - on August 18th, 2011

If there is an award for biggest fan of Lord of the Rings, I believe that husband and wife Steve and Christine Michaels would take the prize.

The couple have built a house in the hills of Montana that would fit in to the Shire. I would imagine that if you entered in the address for Bilbo Baggins on Google Maps for Middle Earth, you would be led here.

Granted, it does not have the circular door that J.R.R. Tolkien emphasized in both The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it is designed for the world of the “big folk”.

You can see a series of photos from my Source that reveal that the house is bigger than it looks. There is no way that Gandalf will be hitting his head on the crossbeams here. There is one door that is so small that it is downright impractical.

Still, this entire place looks very cozy, even though the dwellers have to mow the roof every once in while. Perhaps Peter Jackson should have filmed The Hobbit movie here, assuming that hasn’t already. The whole house cost a price of $410,000, which I’m sure would have been a fraction of a Middle Earth movie budget.

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