IKEA museum set for 2015 delivery
By Frances Cha, CNN • Published 19th May 2014
View Gallery
6 Pictures
Why do their cheap meatballs taste so good?
Why are bookshelves named Billy?
Why can't store layouts be normal?
These questions, and more, will no doubt be posed by the visitors who head to the new IKEA Museum opening next year.
Of course, we might need to hammer together our own answers, having wound our way through thousands of irrelevant facts first.
But perhaps a DIY museum experience will be even more satisfying once completed.
The furniture company that changed the affordability of design has filed to build a museum on the site of its first store in Sweden.
Tentatively scheduled to open in fall 2015, the museum will take up 7,000 square meters on the site of the recently relocated IKEA store in Almhult, also the site of IKEA'S first store opened by founder Ingvar Kamprad in 1958.
IKEA town
Almhult is known as "IKEA Town" for being the birthplace of IKEA, which still maintains a strong corporate presence in the city.
While the then-17-year-old Kamprad had already registered IKEA as a business in 1943, selling products ranging from nylon stockings to cigarette lighters, the Almhult site was the first brick-and-mortar store as well as the company's first furniture showroom.
A small exhibition of IKEA's history, titled "IKEA through the ages," is already in place at the basement of the corporate culture center in Älmhult, but company reps are hoping that the new museum will be a much bigger tourist draw.
"In the IKEA Museum we plan to tell the IKEA story, focusing on range, business and people development over time," said Michele Acuna, managing director for IKEA Tillsammans, the corporate culture center.
"We also plan to have a museum shop and food services for our visitors," said Acuna, adding that the museum is expected to draw "roughly 200,000 visitors annually when it is in full steam."
Would you pay a visit to the IKEA Museum in Sweden? Let us know in the comments.
