Image © Jose 2025
Yes, I’m going to write an entire text about a simple furniture pull that infuriates me every time I use it. You know I have a love/ hate relationship with IKEA, but this is not really about them because they have many furniture pulls. You probably don’t know, but for almost five years I led a design team focused on furniture hardware, great learning and a great company to work with.
We bought an IKEA kitchen, functional and simple, paid for installation including the quartz countertops, that’s where I drew my limit on assembling. While doing this, we sat down and picked a functional, no-nonsense hardware pull, but somewhere along the line I was overridden by a choice of an “almost invisible” pull that was installed everywhere. I let it go, but I knew I was going to curse and complain every time I used it.
The pull is the BILLSBRO, a straight rectangular bar with 90° returns, lightly radiused in the finger grip area, powder-coated aluminum in three typical colors. It mounts on the inside of the drawer/ door, fewer visible holes, edge pull as the industry calls it. The issue is that this pull was designed for light-to-moderate drawer loads, and even there it’s a problem: it has very tight finger clearance. Yes, it keeps visuals clean and avoids snagging, but it forces users into a pinch/ fingertip hook rather than a comfortable hook/ power grip, especially for larger hands or when pulling heavier drawers or refrigerator doors.
Ergonomics, or human factors as it’s called in engineering, never became universally important across all domains at the same time, its adoption has always been patchy and context-specific. It became truly important in WWII-era military design, then spread unevenly depending on stakes, economics, and regulation. In home furniture, it’s been selectively adopted: chairs and work surfaces got attention, hardware pulls rarely did unless accessibility requirements or appliance performance demanded it. In pulls specifically, the biggest ergonomic advances came from industrial kitchen hardware and ADA-inspired accessibility design, not from mainstream decorative hardware trends.
In design school, industrial designers are exposed to anthropometric data, and at least I learned to design for a range of users (often the 5th percentile female to the 95th percentile male, not really considering that 50% of the population are female). While working in the cabinet hardware business, we did study grip types (power grip, pinch grip, hook grip, etc.) and engineers paid attention to muscle fatigue models. We ran usability tests, made mockups and foam models, and conducted user trials to see how different hands interacted with an object. But I’ll be honest: this was not a driver for the hundreds of hardware pulls we designed. It was really about aesthetics, style, and décor, because kitchen and furniture hardware is perceived as low risk, the only issues we paid close attention to were avoiding materials that could break and injure the user (glass, ceramics, etc.).
I can just see the designer Henrik Preutz, who designed the BILLSBRO, reminding me that the problem isn’t the pull, it’s the application. But the idea of using some of these pulls in some places in the kitchen and not in others makes me irk. And though I wish Henrik would have designed a slightly more usable pull and a version for refrigerator doors, he didn’t (or he did and the PM from IKEA decided it was too many SKUs).
An entire text, and I go back to the beginning: I have these kitchen pulls in my kitchen that infuriate me every time I use them, and one of these days I will replace them. Even with the idea of having to live with the holes on the inside of doors and drawers, it will happen. I guarantee you.