With car-free shopping and a tree-covered modular design, the new inner-city IKEA Westbahnhof store in central Vienna is rethinking just about everything you might expect from an IKEA store.
Opening today, IKEA Westbahnhof will be the first inner-city store to offer a full range of IKEA products and provide same-day delivery so customers can leave the car at home. The design of IKEA Westbahnhof is strikingly different. Situated in the middle of urban Vienna, the 7 storey, grid-like design provides an oasis of green in one of the busiest parts of the city.
Designed by local Austrian architects Querkraft as a response to radically changed customer and mobility behaviours, the store showcases innovative sustainable practice, with 160 trees, solar panels and hyper-efficient heating and cooling helping to deliver the store an excellent BREEAM status.
Featuring an omni-channel shopping offering, visitors will need nothing more than the IKEA App and a credit card to shop, and there will be same-day delivery by electric trucks for products that are too big to carry out by hand. Occupying the top two floors will be a hostel called Jo&Joe, run by the Accor group. Above the hostel a rooftop terrace, open to the public and shielded by solar panels, provides events, innovative takeaway and one of the best views of the city.
