This article uses a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach to look at the communication of kitchens in the IKEA catalogue from 1975 until 2016, where we see a predictable shift from function to lifestyle. Using Fairclough’s (1992) concept of ‘technologization’ and van Leeuwen’s (2008) concept of ‘New Writing’, we are able to dig deeper to show that there are four stages of kitchens, which become more and more codified, with increasing prescription over the meaning of space, and also regarding what takes place there. Such coding aligns with the ideas, values and identities of neoliberalism: ‘dynamic’, ‘creative’, ‘solutions’ and ‘selfmanagement’. The features of New Writing, we show, allow a suppression of actual causalities and context and permit symbolic and indexical meanings to take over. Domestic life itself becomes stripped down to a number of symbols and indexical meanings which assemble easily into the requirements of the neoliberal order.