Assembled furniture enthusiasts, rejoice: As of Feb. 8, the shiny new home of Burbank’s Ikea is officially open for business. Though the store moved less than a mile from its original location in downtown Burbank, it’s nearly twice as big – the largest in the nation, in fact, at 456,000 square feet. But for local fans of the Swedish home goods retailer, the best part might be that the days of waiting in that loading zone line have come to an end. “Access and parking were a challenge at the old site,” said Joseph Roth, head of expansion affairs at Ikea North America. “If you didn’t want to do the loading zone, you couldn’t take the cart all the way to the car, because the parking spaces belonged to the Burbank Town Center.” Now the store has 1,700 parking spaces of its own in addition to a spacious loading zone. The interior boasts all the trappings one might expect at a super-Ikea: A playground equipped with a child-sized Swedish farmhouse, a 600-seat restaurant featuring three varieties of meatballs and a showroom that displays every item from Ikea’s furniture collections. “We had a limited product offering at the old store,” Roth said. “Now, all of our inventory is here on site.” Regular customers of the old Burbank store might recognize more than a few familiar faces at Ikea 2.0. In addition to 150 brand-new hires, all 425 so-called “coworkers” from the previous site are back for more. Among them are four who have been employed at the Burbank location since it launched 26 years ago. Room for more The original Burbank Ikea was located adjacent to the Burbank Town Center shopping mall, flanked by a Macy’s Inc. department store and a Corner Bakery Cafe. Ikea signed a 99-year lease to rent the property from the city of Burbank in 1989. Twelve years later, reports surfaced that the company was looking to relocate, as the store had outgrown its spot at 600 N. San Fernando Blvd. But the hunt for a suitable site proved a long one. “When you’re looking for anything between 10 and 30 acres of land, your options are limited,” Roth explained. After scouting around the region for more than a decade, the company pinpointed an industrial property less than a mile south of the original location. Positioned within the sight of drivers along the 5 freeway, the 22-acre site at 805 S. San Fernando Blvd. seemed like an ideal setting for a furniture superstore. In 2012, Ikea began the process of purchasing the site from Crown Realty and Development Inc., which at the time owned the Burbank Town Center; Dallas real estate firm Cypress Equities has since purchased a majority stake in the shopping plaza. Ikea negotiated a deal in which Crown could purchase the previous store’s site and the remaining years on Ikea’s lease for $1.3 million, while Ikea would pay $46 million to buy the property from Crown. The transaction required approval from both the city of Burbank and the California Department of Finance, as the first location had been owned by Burbank’s Successor Agency Oversight Board and was thus subject to regulations surrounding the disposal of municipal redevelopment properties. Authorities approved the exchange in early 2013. A year later, the city of Burbank gave Ikea the go-ahead to begin clearing the site for its new store. But demolition of the commercial buildings on the property had not yet started when the company was met was one last legal hurdle: a lawsuit by Woodland Hills advocacy group Citizens Advocating Rational Development, or CARD, alleging Ikea and the city had failed to meet the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act. “We are confident that both the environmental impact report and the city’s process for approving it were very sound and very correct,” Roth told the Journal in April 2014. “Most folks who followed the review and discussion locally would observe this was a very thorough process.” CARD dropped the suit that October, and in March 2015, demolition finally commenced. On Sept. 1, 2016 the company broke ground at the site, and by late that year the building was ready for move-in. More than a thousand customers flooded Ikea on opening day, according to the company. The excitement was proof that the short move was worth the long process to bring it to fruition, Roth said. “We already had a really established presence here in Burbank,” he said. “The site is a win-win, because we can still stay in Burbank and maintain economic contribution to the area while offering a better experience for our customers.”
Big Boutique
