Ikea ÄPPLARÖ 3 Seater Garden Sofa Hack

My girlfriend and I spent some time recently looking for some garden furniture. After what felt like months of searching, we eventually found what we wanted in Ikea. Note that they sell this on the website with beige or dark coloured cushions, but we found the nice mid-grey cushion below by going in-store. 

ÄPPLARÖ / HÅLLÖ 3-seat sofa
ÄPPLARÖ / HÅLLÖ 3-seat sofa

It’s a modular system that lets you configure the number of seats, add corner sections etc. We chose to just get two corner pieces and a middle piece to create a sofa. With the cushions on it looks great, but there was a thought niggling me when I started putting it together. They only actually make one corner section, which you can spin round and use for both ends. the problem with this can be seen below.

ÄPPLARÖ built the normal way
ÄPPLARÖ built the normal way

If you don’t see it right away I’m very jealous of you. But the way there are two seats with slats facing east / west and then one facing north / south just really hurts my eyes. Sure you can’t see it with the cushions on, but I’m going to be seeing this a lot with just the bare wood showing. [insert joke about the British weather]

Luckily I noticed this problem before I built the last section and realised that by removing 12 screws, I could swap the two sections underneath, and keep the whole thing looking nice & uniform.

ÄPPLARÖ built the hacked way
ÄPPLARÖ built the hacked way

I was honestly a little surprised that there was no mention of this anywhere, and maybe most people would just live with it the way it came. But if you’re like me and need things to be just right luckily there is a simple answer in this case.

Just swap over the two pieces of wood circled below. Make sure you get them facing out the correct way to allow the arm / backrest to screw in correctly.

ÄPPLARÖ parts to swap
ÄPPLARÖ parts to swap

Suppose I’d better add that you do all this stuff at your own risk etc, and this probably will void any warranty you might have. Basically it’s not my fault if you balls it up!

5 thoughts on “Ikea ÄPPLARÖ 3 Seater Garden Sofa Hack”

      1. No, I’m serious ….
        I hadn’t noticed it before but this morning removing the cushions I saw the “error” on the slats …
        If you’ve never seen it, that’s fine …. after the first time …. your eyes don’t see anything else that wrong slats …
        Thanks for the information on the parts to swap

        …. do you have some tips to use\cut an “ÄPPLARÖ
        Table/stool section, outdoor, brown stained number 802.134.46” to connect the sofa sections to follow a C shape

  1. lmao, i talked to customer service about that, they had no idea who the genius designed that this way either. thanks for put this up, gonna disassemble and make it right.

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