The road network could barely cope with a few journalists arriving for a sneak preview yesterday but Ikea says all will be different by Monday
FROM NEXT week it will become Dublin’s newest temple of retail therapy, but yesterday the way to Ikea’s new store in Ballymun led through flooded roads and past wild horses and impromptu rubbish dumps.
The contrast between the smart, rainbow-coloured products on display in the store and the scene outside, half shantytown and half construction site, couldn’t have been greater, even without the weather doing its best to mess things up further.
With the traffic infrastructure that was supposed to be in place before the outlet was allowed to open only half built, the sole access yesterday was via a winding lane, through forests of bollards and road diversions.
The road network could barely cope with a few journalists arriving for a sneak preview, let alone the demand anticipated next week for the country’s largest retail store.
However, things will be better by Monday’s opening, we were promised, with the completion this weekend of a dedicated new access road from St Margaret’s Road. The full Ballymun interchange works are unlikely to be finished before October, according to Fingal County Council.
Things were much brighter inside Ikea’s navy-and-yellow Irish box, its 301st store, which has been ready to go since last November, according to store manager Garry Deakin.
A vast warehouse on stilts, with parking below and the cavernous showroom at the top, the store presents a reassuringly familiar face to Ikea devotees.
“We build the same store everywhere,” explains Deakin, “unless the planners don’t allow it.”
With typically Scandinavian thoroughness, Ikea has broken us all down into different “living situations”, such as “living, single, starting out” or “living, with children”.
Each section of the showroom is then filled with sample furnishings for each room of the house, aimed at the different categories. For those unfamiliar with the scale of Ikea, that’s a whole lot of categories and rooms – and a lot of walking.
A team of 20 interior designers, “visual merchandisers” and “graphical communicators” has worked to design a store that is “inspirational, aspirational and ultimately functional,” according to Gill Reilly, another of the company’s enthusiastic navy-and-yellow garbed “co-workers”.
All the products have Swedish names, some of them unpronounceable, and even the sample volumes on the bookshelves are in Swedish – “It stops people nicking them,” a helpful staff member told me.
Regulars of Ikea stores in Belfast and elsewhere will know that you can’t just pick up the products from the showroom and that the essential of any shopping trip are a tape measure and a pencil, to note down the lengthy serial numbers of any would-be purchases. These you then pick up from the aisles of the warehouse below.
Parents can leave their children at the free creche and use the nursery, while the restaurant sells specialities such as Swedish meatballs to hungry shoppers.
The Ballymun store sells the same range of 9,500 articles available in any other Ikea store but the prices are “tailored” to the local market, says Deakin. Ikea Dublin will be cheaper than local competitors and about the same, at current exchange rates, as its sister store in Belfast, he claims.
With a visit to Ikea surely ranking as the marathon event of shopping, it was noticeable yesterday how the women visitors stayed the course, while the men wilted. And that’s before the real shoppers arrive.