IKEA Hyderabad - Few Design & Engineering Slippages

The Swedish retail company IKEA opened their first store in Hyderabad on August 9, 2018. As any other Hyderabadi, I was eagerly waiting for the opening of the store and wanted to check out the products. But, the design professional inside me was also very curious to experience and analyse, the impact the new building will have on the urban fabric, the overall visual appearance, space planning, structure system and so on.

The project tender for the facility building was floated in Sept 2016 and the project was awarded to Leighton Asia in the first quarter of 2017, built-up area of approx. 90,000 Sqm (2 Basements and G+2 Superstructure).

After the initial couple of weeks in which Hyderabadis crowded up inside and outside the store to get a glimpse of the experience, I was finally able to set foot in. For my visit, I chose a weekday to ensure that I get enough leg-space and peace of mind to carry out my study. Here are a few key observations I made during my visit:

Location - The Store is located in Hitec city, the main commercial area in Hyderabad and is in close vicinity of Raheja Mindspace SEZ, TATA Consultancy, L&T Pearl and several other corporates. During the office hours, the traffic is distressing (to say the least) at Hitec main road and IKEA has further aggravated the situation. In future, a metro station is also planned right in front of IKEA building, which will further add to the challenging traffic congestion issue in the area. People experienced the IKEA impact on the traffic on the very first day of Store. The roads where copiously packed and it took employees hours to reach their homes in the evening.

(Source - https://indianexpress.com)

The silver lining was the courage and enthusiasm exhibited by people to show up at the store to experience something revolutionary (or something pretty close to that).

IKEA has already understood the congestion challenges and rented out 3 parking spaces away from the store (in the radius of 3-4 kilometres). They are running shuttle services to ferry customers between store and the parking.

Though IKEA selected a very approachable location (best suited for supermarkets), it would have been much better if the store could have been planned a little away from the hustle and bustle of the city and connected through Hyderabad’s lifeline ORR. Spending 20 to 30 mins to reach an IKEA store seems reasonable since the individual spends on an average 3 to 4 hours at the store. The store offers an environment for experiential buying and people will not mind a little bit of travel for that.

External Appearance - The 16.0m high building is located at a junction of two 45.0m wide roads. The south-east facade (200m long) and Northeast facade (130m long) are accessible from the 45.0m road. Due to less height, the building does not impact the skyline of the area. But, the vibrant Yellow and Blue (IKEA’s brand colours) make it stand out from the surroundings and the building can be viewed from a far distance. The South-East Facade is designed quite meticulously and houses the main Entrance and Exit, planned next to each other. A combination of curtain wall and low height fenestrations are used without any protrusions and that provides the building a very strong look. All the fenestrations have solar shades. The facade is extended above the roof edge to hide the roof truss and delivers a pronounced building edge.

Planning and Structural System - The Ground floor is dedicated to Market hall, a double height warehouse (self-service furniture) area and checkout counters. The first floor houses the Showroom space. The office area is planned on the second floor along with space for services.

The building follows the IKEA standard design of sequential flow and doesn’t provide any option for the customers to make choices of visiting only a particular counter of their choice. As soon as you enter the store, the two big escalators take you to the Food court to help fuel yourself for venturing on the exuberantly exhausting journey of upgrading your house.

Though IKEA has planned a 1000-seater restaurant, but, there was still a long queue for ordering the food. The huge length of the queue was partly because people are not allowed to enter the seating area before ordering the food. I couldn’t muster the courage to invest time analysing the bottleneck here, but it seemed like the number of order/cash counters were not sufficient to handle the inflow. Also, this was on a working weekday. The situation would be worse on weekends and this certainly needs to be looked into, especially given the fact that Hyderabadis love eating out. The restaurant is naturally lit from the South-West side and provides a good outside view.

From the food court, the customers are directed towards the Showroom floor. This space is well planned, and customers are moved from one display area to other. The direction marks on the floor take the customers to the Market hall, Warehouse area and finally to the payment counter located on the ground floor.

The building is a composite structure of RCC columns, RCC flat slab and Steel truss roof. The customer will hardly realize the difference in the structure system at the ground and first floor due to the 2X2 meters metal grid ceiling at 3.0m level from Finished Floor Level. Visually, it restricts the customers’ sight and directs their attention to the attractive displays.

I personally liked the flat slab system for Ground Floor ceiling. It was well finished and neat. Contrary to it, the first-floor roof was having approx. 1.5 m deep truss system with traditional primary and secondary members, making it look like a spider web. Few Skylights were provided at the roof, but they were quite ineffective due to huge ducts and services hanging from the truss. A better system would have made the roof much lighter. ISMB hot rolled / PEM structure could have been used, which would have resulted in the reduction of building height. It would have been a major saving in structure and air conditioning CAP & OPEX cost.

The Showroom area has a light grey vinyl floor which goes quite well with the white display counters and partition walls. The Market hall and Warehouse area at ground floor have a concrete power floated floor, which is matching the floor colour at first floor. Achieving a uniform grade slab is quite a challenge and is evident here as well. You can clearly see the difference in concrete colours, rough patches and shoe marks throughout the floor.

As I entered the showroom area at first floor, I saw a massive duct entering the floor. It doesn’t seem a good idea to have the main duct coming from AHU, to be so apparently visible when you enter the floor. I am sure many of the customers must have observed it. Adding to it, an additional Fire protection pipe and sprinkler are placed below the duct to meet the local norms. This could have been easily removed with little articulation and coordination between the Architect and HVAC Engineer.

Another thing which grabbed my attention is the use of groove and installation ready coupling for fire protection. It really reduces the on-site work and accelerates the installation schedule.

Those are some of my observations from a design and engineering perspective. Some of the deficiencies might already have been identified by the design team and, I hope, will be duly addressed in the IKEA stores coming up in other cities.

From the perspective of a buyer though, IKEA definitely is going to be a landmark change in the manner we buy stuff for our homes. The range of designs which are on offer in almost all home furnishing categories, will lure the Hyderabadis to frequent the store, again and again.