Älmhult is a peculiar place. As the birthplace of IKEA, it has slowly been subsumed but the company it created. The town is not very big any more, but the Ikea campus on the other side of the train tracks (and the huge Stena factory) dominate the landscape.

A lot of the town was closed late on Sunday when I stopped in, but there are a range of restaurants of various price points and behind the town hall there is an engraved stone for the King, not listed on google maps, and only found via Pokemon Go’s portals.

Not a particularly vibrant seeming place, and it gives the impression that the train tracks that separate it from the IKEA museum, also keep the tourists on the IKEA side of town rather than coming across whilst they visit.

King’s Stone

A small stone, engraved for the King’s visit to Älmhult.

IKEA Museum

IKEA’s original building in Älmhult has been refurbished into a sleek 3 floor museum of IKEA’s history, with the IKEA motel facing it across the carpark.

The motel was originally built to facilitate people coming to IKEA from further away as the shopping experience was a guided one. IKEA prioritised hiring and training housewives for its consultants as they worked on the principal no one knew the home better and could articulate the needs more clearly.

Aside from a fascinating run through IKEA’s history from a single store in Älmhult to the global mega-brand it is today, we also get insight into the change in identity, slowly consolidating into the blue and yellow we know today from the viking hats and moose used across the world at various points in its history.

The top floor contained the exhibition relating to Human Shelter, a documentary co-funded by Ikea looking into what makes a home, from the shacks floating on the rivers of Nigeria, to the tiny mobile homes of the Saami to the refugee camps the exhibition shows highlights from the films projected into representative spaces of the rooms shown.

There is also a small IKEA store selling a number of unique items unavailable in any mainstream IKEA, and a restaurant offering not just the famous meatballs and hotdogs (the history of both being covered in the museum) but also an additional four meatball types to try.