Buy a Lean House at Ikea

Ikea has announced that it is moving into the property business as it reveals a new 26-acre development near the Olympic Park. Strand East will contain 1,200 new homes, 480,000 square feet of offices and a 350-bedroom hotel in Stratford, east London. It is the first major British development for LandProp, part of the Inter Ikea Group, which owns the intellectual assets of the furniture chain.

After

Before

The company is believed to have paid about £25million for the site, which had previously been in receivership. It is the second biggest private-sector project in the Olympic Park, after the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre which opened last month.

House-building is not a new business for Ikea; back in 1997 they introduced a pre-fab home to the U.K. market called BoKlok (http://www.boklok.com/theconcept/).

The Ikea website emphasizes one of the advantages of this approach to home-building — the opportunity to lean-out the tremendously un-lean process called house-building. (If you want to see un-lean practices, just stand around a home, condo, or office tower building site for a couple of hours; you will see so much room for improvement you’ll want to take two aspirin with a double Americano.)

BoKlok has recently launched a terraced house to give even more people a chance to live in a modern new built home to a cost that they can afford.

The two floors give room for all the functions a family with two children needs. On the ground floor, a light and airy kitchen with space for cooking, home work and entertaining. The living room has large windows that make the whole home connect to the outside environment. The first floor is the private space, with 3 bedrooms a bathroom and a large closet. A well planned outdoor area where it is easy to get to know the neighbours and where everyone feels safe.

The straight forward architecture makes the production lean and cost efficient. The narrow street front caters for efficient use of land.

We build our homes indoors in efficient and modern factories. In combination with our large volumes, this means that we can save on material used and on transportation. This gives lower housing costs and climate-smart living at the same time!
Here are some benefits of factory based manufacturing:

• Increased optimisation of used material, which minimises waste.
• Recycling of all waste.
• Less packaging material as we purchase all good in large quantities.
• Good control of the moist level of the wood, which eliminates the need for drying at the work site, and thereby do away with that extra, unnecessary time and energy waste.
• It does not rain indoors.