I quite like reading about IKEA. I even like writing about the company sometimes as well, everything from cultural differences to the food to its role abroad. Maybe it’s because IKEA, considered by some to be the epitome of Swedishness, is no longer headquartered in Sweden. In fact, the headquarters are in the Netherlands and have been there for quite some time now. The long list of holding companies that have a hand in the IKEA brand and business is too long to list here and seems to me to just be a confusing mess of multinational corporations.

But regardless of where the company is headquartered, the blue and yellow bags, the product names, and even the food still remind people of Sweden (and I would argue it is a good reminder of the constant spread of different cultural and economic ideas across borders). And so when I saw that IKEA was in the news again recently, I couldn’t help but read up a bit on what was going on. Some of you have probably already come across the news, but the company has just announced that it will be opening about 100 hotels throughout Europe starting with Germany in 2014. Interestingly enough, the hotels are essentially just being run by the larger company and will not include the IKEA name or even IKEA furniture.

The idea though is the same. Create a well-designed product available to customers for a low price. Hence the well-designed budget hotel idea. Despite the lack of IKEA furniture, it looks like the hotels will still offer Scandinavian design. No word yet on whether each individual room will have a different Swedish name.

This is of course in conjunction with the other real estate investments the company has been making in the past few years. There is the BoKlok idea, which some people refer to as flat-packed homes in, available in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Along with the move to hotels, IKEA will be entering the student housing market and begn providing housing to students in larger university towns. (There are plenty of students in Sweden, who probably wouldn’t complain too much if they had an IKEA student house to live in considering the housing shortage which Steve discussed a while back.)

What do you guys think? Is this getting too far from what IKEA is known for? Or does it matter?

And in case you want to read up a bit on this in the Swedish press, here are a couple of links:

• Ikea bygger upp ny hotellkedja i Europa
• Ikea bygger budgethotell
• Ikea startar lågprishotell