Steel framework for walls is now up the Ikea site in Mt Wellington, Auckland. Photo / Jason Dorday
Steel framework for walls is now up the Ikea site in Mt Wellington, Auckland. Photo / Jason Dorday
Steel framing for exterior and interior walls of New Zealand’s first Ikea store is rising, as construction workers make progress on the store to be the size of four rugby fields.
“They’re moving fast,” said one industry observer of the steel-framed Mt Wellington building for the Swedish homewaregiant.
The site is across the railway line from Kiwi Property Group’s Sylvia Park shopping centre and its new Resido apartments, opening around May.
The framework for the building is now visible, with the first two of three levels up.
Fabian Winterbine, Ikea’s expansion manager for Australasia and New Zealand, told the Herald in January about the construction method.
He explained why steel would go up and how walls would be made.
The exterior walls would be like an insulated sandwich panel that came complete with the eye-catching blue cladding, which is the distinctive Ikea store colour, he said then.
The steel not only created the strength and framework of the walls but was designed to allow the exterior cladding to be slotted into them, he said.
Ikea is developing a three-level building of 32,000sq m, giving an interior floor space of 3.2ha which is slightly over the size of four rugby fields.
Three cranes are now on the site where Naylor Love won the head contract. Two are fixed tower cranes and one is a red mobile all-terrain crane.
How Ikea is planned to look at Sylvia Park, Mt Wellington. Photo / Kiwi Property Group
“All three cranes are working, so they’re hitting the job hard and fast,” said another industry expert.
The spans of steel were so large and heavy that the big cranes were needed to lift structures into place. Pre-fabricated panels would be fitted to the structure, potentially speeding the work, he said, because off-site construction manufacturing meant less work on the site and faster progress.
Three huge cranes are now operating on the Ikea site in Mt Wellington. Photo / Jason Dorday
Once all the structure was up, the roof and facade would go on, ready for the fit-out of a dry interior site. Pre-fabrication was a much faster way of building, he said, and steel-framed buildings enabled larger spans.
Each of the tower cranes is around 25 to 30m high, one with a boom that could be 40m long, he said.
Last June, Mirja Viinanen, Ikea NZ and Australia chief executive and chief sustainability officer, was here to announce construction had begun.
In 2019, the chain said it was coming but it’s taken time.
It was 2018 when the company announced its intentions to grant the Ingka Group exclusive rights to explore expansion opportunities in New Zealand.
In January, site enabling works were under way and Winterbine said then that 500 piles had been sunk into the ground, the depths varying across the site. Some of those are 40-50 metres into the ground.
How the site looked in January: an orange crane from Dominion Constructors was one of the two largest pieces of equipment on the site. Photo / Carlson Bluck
Opening in mid-to-late 2025 was still the target “and we’re still on track. We’re six to seven months in from groundbreaking so we’re very happy about progress with the new store”, Winterbine said three months ago.
Deep civil drainage and horizontal foundations were done by January, along with the design for the store, which has been awarded the NZ Green Building Council five-star rating, based on its plans, Winterbine said.
Drone footage then showed progress with piling is under way, trenches dug, earthmoving equipment used and a Dominion Constructors red crawler crane is working alongside a towering white Naylor Love luffing crane.
The site is off Carbine Rd on Clemow Dr.
In 2022, the Overseas Investment Office granted Netherlands-owned Ikea New Zealand consent to buy the site for a secret amount.
It was satisfied the property was not sensitive. That decision said the opening date for the new store would be this December. The pathway for consent was under the significant business assets and made no mention of Kiwi, saying instead the vendor identification that was “not applicable”.
Meanwhile, Ikea New Zealand is busy learning about life at home in this country. It invited people to participate in investigations into how we live, our habits: “Right now we are busy learning about life at home in New Zealand. We can’t wait to introduce Kiwis to the Swedish flat-pack.”
The retailer was founded in Sweden in 1943, but now has 400-plus stores in about 60 countries.
“We want to give the many people of New Zealand easy access to a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low everybody is able to afford them,” the retailer says on its local website.
Anne Gibson has been the Herald’s property editor for 24 years, has won many awards, written books and covered property extensively here and overseas.
