IKEA brings Swedish design to Daegu this month

Global home furnishings giant IKEA is expanding to southeastern Korea this month, opening its first store in Daegu — about 235 kilometers southeast of Seoul — on Sept. 17 inside the downtown Shinsegae department store near Dongdaegu Station. The roughly 1,000-square-meter store, called IKEA Shinsegae Department Store Daegu, will be IKEA Korea's largest city-center-format outlet to date and its first physical store in the Daegu-North Gyeongsang region. It follows two earlier city-center stores — inside Lotte Department Store's Gwangju branch, opened last November, and Hyundai Premium Outlet's Songdo location, opened in July — as IKEA moves away from its earlier strategy of building large standalone "big-box" stores on city outskirts. IKEA said the Daegu store will offer showrooms, home-furnishing consultation and space-planning services, with an emphasis on storage and space-saving solutions suited to the region's apartment-heavy housing. It will also include a market selling Swedish food and snacks exclusive to IKEA stores. The company cited a roughly 10-month pop-up store it ran