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 outlet, called IKEA Shinsegae Department Store Daegu, will be IKEA Korea's largest city-center-format store to date and its first physical location in the Daegu-North Gyeongsang region, an area with a combined population of roughly 5 million that had previously lacked a permanent IKEA presence.

The new store follows two earlier city-center openings — inside Lotte Department Store's Gwangju branch, launched last November, and Hyundai Premium Outlet's Songdo location, which opened in July — as IKEA shifts away from its earlier strategy of building large standalone "big-box" stores on city outskirts. The smaller format reflects broader changes in Korean retail, where department stores and outlets have been reworking their tenant mixes to add experience-oriented offerings as they compete with fast-growing e-commerce.

According to IKEA, the Daegu store will feature 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 available only at IKEA stores.

The company pointed to a roughly 10-month pop-up store it operated at a Daegu shopping mall from October 2023 to July 2024, which drew about 200,000 visitors, as evidence of demand in the region. Its Songdo store, meanwhile, attracted about 65,000 visitors in its first week after opening.

The Daegu location connects directly to Dongdaegu Station, a hub for the KTX and SRT high-speed rail lines, as well as Daegu's Subway Line 1 and an intercity bus terminal — sparing regional customers the trip to IKEA's existing large-format store in eastern Busan.

"IKEA is continuing to expand the ways it meets customers so that more people can experience home furnishing easily in their daily lives," the Daegu store's manager said, adding that the company hopes local customers will find ideas suited to their own homes.

IKEA Korea, which entered the country in 2014 with a store in Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi Province, now operates seven stores and an e-commerce platform. It plans to open a city-center store in Daejeon later this year, continuing a cadence of small-format openings that suggests more Korean cities could see similar locations.

This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.