‘First we take London, then we take Hamburg’
Harald Müller, CEO of Landprop (the real estate development branch of Inter Ikea), has revealed the plans for a completely new living area near the centre of Hamburg or near the airport. To make this happen, the group is looking for terrain of about five acres. The current city council, which made city growth a priority, allegedly likes these plans, although no real conversations have taken place with Ikea.
Hamburg will be the second city in Europe where the Swedes want to build an “Ikea City”. Earlier, the company had revealed similar plans for a London Ikea-district, “Strand East”, which should be ready in five or six years. Constructions of that city should begin next year.
Budgethotels and student dorms
City districts are not the only real estate projects that Ikea is getting involved in: last week, the group confirmed its plans to build about 100 hotels in the budget-design category in European cities. Its first targets would be The Netherlands, Great-Britain and Poland, where the company is already involved in real estate.
A third project involves student dorms: the group is thinking of building several living areas with 500 to 700 dorm rooms of 17.5 sqm. Rather small areas, but “everyone who has been to Ikea before, knows that you can create a lot of space in these kind of areas”, as Harald Müller stated to the German real estate magazine Immobilien Zeitung.
Translation by Sanne Raspoet
