IKEA Just Announced a New Type of Store—Here’s Everything You Need to Know

Lauren Phillips

If you dream of ducking quickly into IKEA while running errands without getting lost in the maze of showrooms and the warehouse, this new type of store could make it happen.

When you think of an IKEA store, you probably picture the enormous warehouse-like space with the café, full-size room layouts, and that signature blue exterior. Sure, there’s IKEA delivery and online shopping now, but wandering through the store and examining BILLY bookcases and the IKEA closet organizer collections is an experience as much as it is a shopping trip. To expand the accessibility of that experience, IKEA launched a new type of IKEA store—the Planning Studio—in the U.S. earlier in 2019, and now the furniture superstore is launching another new store layout.

The first location for this new type of IKEA store will be in Queens, New York, opening in summer 2020 as the third IKEA store in New York City and the sixth in the area. It will be the first IKEA store to open in the U.S. with a new, smaller layout, leading to a new era in IKEA shopping.

Instead of loading up the car and trekking out to the enormous IKEA store on the edge of town, furniture shoppers and Swedish meatball fanatics will be able to peruse the thousands of IKEA products available for purchase without venturing too far from city centers or heavily populated urban areas. Customers will be able to shop for smaller IKEA items and take them home with them; larger furniture items will be on display, and customers will be able to set up easy flat-rate delivery for these bigger purchases.

This third type of IKEA store layout is a middle-ground between the enormous warehouse-like stores and the much smaller city-center planning studios, which don’t have products available for purchase. (At 115,000 square feet, the first store of this kind in Queens will be about one-third the size of a typical IKEA store.) The new layout offers a shopping option in or near city centers, boasting a selection of products without requiring a possibly lengthy trek to the IKEA store, which is especially helpful in areas where few people have cars.

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According to the press release announcing the new store, the Queens store (and, likely, other stores with the same layout) will offer home delivery, assembly, and installation; an on-the-go food station; and family-friendly spaces. IKEA is planning to develop 30 new “customer meeting points”—likely including some of these latest store types or the planning studios—in cities in the next three years.

If your area doesn’t have space for an enormous IKEA store, this new, mid-sized store layout may be the solution—and one may come to your area before you know it. With the more compact size and limited selection, it may even mean quicker IKEA trips; someday, picking up new IKEA dish towels might be as easy as a Target run.