Ikea’s new Planning Studio, mainly for kitchen browsers, is a thing of beauty, but are other shoppers being short-changed in the retailer’s rush to please the urban elite? 

Time to change your kitchen? It’s the kind of thing that happens when work surfaces begin to look a little tired, when you spot a fancy new induction hob or maybe when you move house, but it will involve money.

If you’re on a budget, you may head for the freshly opened Ikea Planning Studio on London’s Tottenham Court Road, where on display are a range of kitchen roomsets and, on the floor above, a number of staff are on hand to help you cook up a food prep area to gasp over.

All good, but what happens if you happen to want a bedroom? Doubtless the same staff could help you to select from Ikea’s online emporium and go through the process of creating a dream bedroom, as it were, but the experience is unlikely to be as first hand as looking at stock/roomsets to get you in the mood and then heading off to the store’s design area.

Urban appeal

Follow this line of thought and it appears there are currently two approaches to the business of setting up shop in an urban location.

The first is to go niche and create an interior that will appeal to louche urban dwellers who want to make their urban pad ‘just so’. This will mean stores catering for kitchen buyers, other outlets for those wanting a new bedroom and standalone sitting room emporia, for example.

Then there are the catch-all merchants that will try to portray the essence of all, say, home interiors, with a few beds, a couple of kitchens and maybe a sofa or two (accompanied by appropriate accessories: mugs, jugs, scatter cushions and suchlike).

The latter approach is exemplified by the new Heals store in Westfield’s shopping centre at Shepherd’s Bush, which covers everything you might need for a contemporary home, albeit not in great depth.

But which is more likely to yield positive results? The answer is probably that either will do, as long as they are done well, but the single category does come with a significant caveat.

Width Vs depth?

The Ikea Planning Studio is just across the road from the Heals mothership (which is big enough to cover everything anyway) and the contrast is stark, but both will work for specific shoppers. The problem that Ikea faces is that small space and a single category does mean potentially shedding a few urban customers who might head across the street to Heals, or Habitat. Price is not all.

If you adopt the single category approach and you are in an area where there are options, you’d better be stone cold certain that there are enough customers of your chosen category to bring the whole thing successfully to the boil. Width, not depth, may actually be better.