What it’s like to stay in Ikea’s only hotel

FastCompany: Ikea bed, Ikea sheets, Ikea towels, Ikea desk, Ikea chairs, Ikea curtains, Ikea light fixtures, Ikea trashcans, Ikea clothes hangers, Ikea side tables, Ikea throw pillow, Ikea clock. This is the rough inventory of a room in the world’s only Ikea hotel—the Ikea Hotell in its Swedish spelling—located in Älmhult, Sweden, the same small town where Ikea was founded in the 1940s and where its headquarters still sits. I stayed a night in this very Ikea hotel recently during a reporting trip to Älmhult for a story about (surprise, surprise) Ikea.

As one would expect, the lobby, amenity spaces, and hotel rooms themselves are outfitted entirely with Ikea furnishings— Fröset chairs in the lobby, the Alex desk in the rooms, and the basic duvets on the beds. Stepping into my hotel room was like entering one of the meticulously furnished mock bedrooms on an Ikea store’s showroom floor, but with only a quarter the amount of stuff and the spatial efficiency one would expect from a company built around affordability. You can insert your own joke here about having to build the bed before you sleep in it. But you actually do have to use an Allen key wrench to open the hotel room door.

(Kidding!) [Photo: Ikea] One night in Ikea’s hotel I was in Älmhult for an exclusive daylong visit at Ikea headquarters in early April. Ikea invited me as the first journalist to see its secretive prototype lab , the space where its conceptual designs get molded and refined into the roughly 2,000 new products introduced to Ikea stores every year. For my one-night stay in Älmhult, the Ikea Hotell offered full immersion into the brand before my tour. Ikea items and branding were everywhere in the lobby and amenity spaces, and the hotel room itself serves as a try-before-you-buy retail experience.

It’s also the most convenient—and affordable—hotel near Ikea’s domineering headquarters in this provincial Swedish village of about 17,000, many of whom are employed by the global home furnishings behemoth. Älmhult sits an 80-minute train ride from Malmö, where a few thousand of its workers live. (The hourly direct trains leaving Älmhult station in the afternoons are standing-room only.) Throw a stone in Älmhult and you’ll hit some piece of the Ikea universe. Venture farther and you’re back out in the Swedish countryside. [Photo: Nate Berg] Designed out of necessity The hotel itself is deeply tied to Ikea’s history in the town.

It’s located across a wide parking lot from a warehouse-sized building that was Ikea’s first purpose-built furniture showroom . Opened in 1958 with a modernist concrete design, it became national news and a magnet for customers. Initially created to simply display Ikea’s furniture, it was soon adapted into the first Ikea store, drawing budget-conscious shoppers from across Sweden. It stayed in operation for more than 50 years. The store reopened in 2015 as the Ikea Museum , with three floors of exhibition space packed with historic furnishings and paraphernalia, plus a cafeteria and a gift shop.

Guests at the hotel are given a card upon check-in that grants free admission. The hotel exists because of the showroom turned museum. During its days as the first Ikea store, its allure drew customers from far and wide, including many who traveled so far they needed to stay overnight in Älmhult before driving back home with a carload of flat-packed furniture . Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad saw an opportunity, and in 1962 commissioned an architect to design an American-influenced roadside motel , with 25 rooms and, in a rarity for this part of Sweden, a heated pool.

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The article discusses Ikea's innovative use of hospitality to enhance brand identity, which is significant for the industry, moderately novel as experiential marketing is growing, and highly relevant for brand strategy professionals seeking actionable insights.