Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light, though wise men at their end know dark is right, because their words had forked no lightning they, do not go gentle into that good night.
IKEA brings Swedish design to Daegu this month
A promotional image for IKEA Korea's first store in Daegu / Courtesy of IKEA Korea
By Jhoo Dong-chan
Global home furnishings giant IKEA is expanding to southeastern Korea this month, opening its first store in Daegu — about 235 kilometers southeast of Seoul — on Sept. 17 inside the downtown Shinsegae department store near Dongdaegu Station.
The roughly 1,000-square-meter store, called IKEA Shinsegae Department Store Daegu, will be IKEA Korea's largest city-center-format outlet to date and its first physical store in the Daegu-North Gyeongsang region.
It follows two earlier city-center stores — inside Lotte Department Store's Gwangju branch, opened last November, and Hyundai Premium Outlet's Songdo location, opened in July — as IKEA moves away from its earlier strategy of building large standalone "big-box" stores on city outskirts.
IKEA said the Daegu store will offer showrooms, home-furnishing consultation and space-planning services, with an emphasis on storage and space-saving solutions suited to the region's apartment-heavy housing. It will also include a market selling Swedish food and snacks exclusive to IKEA stores.
The company cited a roughly 10-month pop-up store it ran at a Daegu shopping mall from October 2023 to July 2024, which drew about 200,000 visitors, as evidence of demand in the region. The Songdo store drew about 65,000 visitors in its first week after opening.
The Daegu store connects directly to Dongdaegu Station, a hub for the KTX and SRT high-speed rail lines, as well as Daegu's Subway Line 1 and an intercity bus terminal — sparing regional customers the trip to IKEA's existing large-format store in eastern Busan.
"IKEA is continuing to expand the ways it meets customers so that more people can experience home furnishing easily in their daily lives," the Daegu store's manager said, adding that the company hopes local customers will find ideas suited to their own homes.
IKEA Korea, which entered the country in 2014 with a store in Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi Province, now operates seven stores and an e-commerce platform. It plans to open a city-center store in Daejeon later this year.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.