IKEA breaks ground on its Utopian village within London

Swedish-based international furniture mega-store chain IKEA has started an ambitious new project: the development of entire urban communities.

Starting from humble beginnings of selling matches door to door via a bicycle, the Swedish company now want to put you and 6,000 neighbours into a neglected corner of your city, design an entire urban world around you, and live a complete IKEA lifestyle. Their bold, high-concept notion of an urban neighbourhood could be an important solution to the housing-supply shortages that plague many large cities – but it could take some getting used to.

“We are in keeping with the Ikea philosophy: We don’t want to produce for the rich or the super-rich; we want to produce for the families, for the people,” Harald Müller told The Globe and Mail.   Müller  heads LandProp, the property-development branch of Inter IKEA, the company that invests the profits from the furnishing giant.

“Our approach must be to get the right housing and office prices while delivering very good quality at the same time, he added. “We want to be smart enough in our design that we can offer the product for a reasonable price.”

On a site in East London, not far from the 2012 Olympic site, is the 11-hectare LandProp Services bought in 2009. Their vision is to turn this grey netherworld, once planning approval is done, into a tightly packed neighbourhood they’ll call Strand East.

It will look, once complete, like a reproduction of the sort of historic, chic downtown neighbourhoods you find in the far more central parts of London or Paris, not in this distant expanse of former dockyards and bloodless public-housing project. At its core are straight, car-free streets lined with simple townhouses and ground-floor-access flats in five-storey rows. In the alleyways behind – an imitation of the classic London backstreet, the mews – will be little two- and three-storey homes, all with direct access to the street.

The 1,200 homes and apartments, 40 per cent of them large enough for families (making it a much more child-filled place than most post-industrial developments), will be priced to appeal to a range of incomes, the Swedes promise. A few seven- to 11-storey condominium towers will pepper the area, and offices for high-tech firms and a hotel will fill the busier edges. Secreted beneath the whole structure is an underground parking garage, to keep cars off the interior streets. Bus lanes and pedestrian walkways will cut across it, squares and public areas abound. The whole thing is designed to create the sense of happiness and discovery you get when wandering a historic European neighbourhood – or, for that matter, an Ikea store.

The company says no, there will not be an IKEA store opening in the neighborhood – Strand East residents will have to make the trek to either the Wembley or Tottenham stores to finish furnishing their new digs.


Gizmag