When Ikea was in talks to buy a big piece of land in Las Vegas, executives wanted to keep it hush-hush.
They even gave the deal a code name in honor of Nevada: “Project Silver.”
“I named it myself,” Ikea spokesman Joseph Roth said.
Ikea, the popular Swedish furniture dealer and meatball slinger, paid a fortune for the site at the southwest corner of Sunset Road and Durango Drive, and it’s building a 351,000-square-foot superstore there.
It’s not the only construction project in the southwest valley today, and unlike other big plans at Sunset and Durango, this one is actually taking shape.
Workers are building Ikea's steel frame, and construction crews on Sunday began installing blue exterior panels to form the shell of the building.
Ikea, which showed the site Tuesday to news media, broke ground in April and expects to open the store next summer. It will be Ikea’s 42nd store nationally.
The two-level store — offering Ikea’s low-priced, self-assembly furniture — is expected to employ about 300 people and will include a 450-seat restaurant serving, among other things, Swedish meatballs.
Clark County commissioners approved project plans in September, and Ikea closed its purchase of the 26-acre site in December. It bought the land for $21.3 million from M.J. Dean Construction founder Michael Dean, who acquired the site through foreclosure in 2010, property records show.
On Tuesday, Roth said the code name was needed in part because the company wanted to avoid a “bidding war” if people found out that Ikea was eyeing the land.
“You don’t want to skew the real estate market by it getting out that Ikea is looking,” he said.
Still, Ikea’s purchase price — about $819,000 per acre — far outweighed the market average. Last year in Southern Nevada, land sold for about $276,000 per acre, according to Colliers International.
Roth has said the company paid “a fair price” for the property.
Sunset and Durango
Southwest Las Vegas is one of the most-active areas for construction in the valley. Most of the work involves apartment complexes, single-family housing tracts and warehouses.
Projects underway near Ikea include a 310-unit apartment complex and the roughly 116,000-square-foot American Preparatory Academy, a charter school.
Ikea’s store, however, isn’t the first big project planned for the Durango-Sunset intersection.
Last decade, developers sought to build The Curve right about where Ikea is now taking shape. Plans for the first phase alone called for two 18-story luxury condo towers; at least 10 buildings with retail and restaurant space; and about 60,000 square feet of offices above retail, according to news releases.
Construction was supposed to begin by early 2006. But after the economy collapsed, Dean acquired the land through foreclosure, according to Clark County records.
He was no stranger to the site; Dean was a partner in the failed project, and he'd been tapped to build it as the lead contractor, reports said.
He did not return a call Tuesday seeking comment.
Across the street, at the southeast corner of Durango and Sunset, developers from Las Vegas and Ireland — an ironic tandem in hindsight, given that Ireland also had an enormous, doomed real estate bubble last decade — pursued plans during the go-go years for Sullivan Square.
Their $800 million high-rise project was supposed to include 1,300 to 1,400 residential units, 45,000 square feet of retail and 272,000 square feet of offices.
"We have designed a Euro-urban site plan with a balanced mix of residential, retail and office space," developers said in 2007.
Excavation and utility work began that summer. But by spring 2008, the project had been hit with $2 million worth of lawsuits and liens, and the developers owed another $2 million to consultants and vendors, according to news reports.
Meanwhile, the project's Irish developers reportedly secured financing for Sullivan Square from Anglo Irish Bank. The now-defunct lender had pushed heavily into real estate deals, was nationalized in early 2009 while sinking under soured loans, and, according to the Irish Times, is "synonymous with Ireland’s economic collapse."
Today, the Sullivan Square site is little more than a giant hole in the ground with no signs of work.