Fans of Swedish meatballs and self-assembly cabinets are one step closer to retail paradise.
IKEA, the popular low-priced furniture chain, has set a ground-breaking date of April 9 for its first Southern Nevada location.
The 351,000-square-foot superstore is slated to open in summer 2016 in the southwest valley, just west of Durango Drive between the 215 Beltway and Sunset Road.
Work crews have already been clearing and grading the site.
The store will include three model-home interiors, 50 room settings, a supervised children’s play area and a 450-seat restaurant serving, among other things, meatballs with lingonberries.
IKEA bought the 26-acre site in December for $21.3 million from M.J. Dean Construction founder Michael Dean, who acquired the land through foreclosure in 2010, property records show.
IKEA’s purchase price — $819,328 per acre — far outweighed the market average. In Southern Nevada, land sold for an average $276,422 per acre in 2014, according to Colliers International.
The Las Vegas store will employ 300 people and be IKEA’s 42nd location in the United States.
When company officials announced their plans for the store last summer, they said they’d been considering the market for a decade.
Customer turnout is expected to be big. In 2011, Las Vegas Sun sister paper Las Vegas Weekly published an issue on what the valley really needed, and one of the top picks was an IKEA store.
IKEA was founded in Sweden in 1943 and opened its first U.S. store, in the Philadelphia suburbs, in 1985.