[category]
[title]
A couple of weeks ago, something blue and yellow crawled up along the opposite side of Select Citywalk’s main entrance in Saket, resting on a smidge of DLF Avenue’s walls. I’ll be honest, it’s easy to zone out and fiddle with your phone when you’re walking anywhere in this stretch. So it helps that IKEA is one of the most famous furniture brands in the world. The font and colours announcing its impending arrival to South Delhi are instantly recognisable.
Rumours are now swirling that the store is set to open by the end of July. But IKEA’s first store in Delhi, actually, had opened in Pacific Mall, Tagore Garden, almost a year ago. It’s going to be amusing to see how the girlies of South Delhi take this one.
What is IKEA?
It’s known primarily for its meatballs, put-it-together-yourself kits, and being a niche date place (seriously, try out a supermarket or store date). The whole thing traces back to a small Swedish town in the 1940s with then 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad. In a plot twist every other South Delhi parent will find deeply relatable, it was funded by money his father gave him as a reward for doing well in school. He started off selling pens and wallets before pivoting to furniture in 1948, which is when the brand as we now know it properly began.
The name, incidentally, isn't some Scandinavian design term you've been mispronouncing this whole time. IKEA is simply an acronym: Ingvar Kamprad's initials, followed by Elmtaryd, the farm he grew up on, and Agunnaryd, his home village.
The flat-pack format, the thing IKEA is arguably most famous (and most cursed) for, came about in 1953 as a fix for the high costs and frequent damage that came with shipping furniture by mail order. Self-assembly wasn't glamorous, but it solved a real logistics headache. What screams South Delhi more than ‘this is my 1BHK with makeshift furniture’ anyway?
What can you buy at IKEA in Delhi?
Globally, the brand carries somewhere in the range of 12,000 products, though what actually turns up on Indian shelves is a curated slice of that: India's online catalogue currently runs to over 7,000 items, and the brand has said it keeps a broadly consistent core range across markets while adjusting for regional tastes and home sizes (translation: expect more balcony- and garden-friendly pieces here than you'd find in, say, a Tokyo store, given how IKEA India has clocked that Delhi-NCR homes tend to come with more outdoor space than most other Indian cities).
Delhi's own shopping habits are apparently already a known quantity to the brand: bedroom furniture, workspaces, and storage solutions have emerged as the most popular categories among the city's shoppers so far, based on the online orders placed since e-commerce launched here in March 2025.
As for what the Saket store itself will actually look like on the inside – going by IKEA's Pacific Mall outpost in Tagore Garden, its first Delhi store, spread across roughly 15,000 sq. ft. – expect a compact but far-ranging version of the IKEA experience, with room settings designed around Delhi homes, planning tools, and possibly a Swedish cafe slinging the brand's cult-favourite snacks. Anything bigger – your sofas, your wardrobes, your ambitious bed frames – will probably be ordered in-store and delivered home from IKEA's full online range, since a mall unit was never going to swallow a warehouse's worth of stock.
Worth noting: given that it’s in-mall, this probably also will not be the full blue-box-in-a-parking-lot experience that IKEA is known for. Proper large-format stores are being built out separately in Gurugram (expected by 2026) and Noida (further out, around 2029).