Dezeen Magazine

A rooftop park

Dorte Mandrup designs IKEA Copenhagen store with rooftop park

Danish studio Dorte Mandrup has designed a city-centre IKEA store with a public rooftop park that will act as a "green lounge" for Copenhagen, Denmark.

Slated to open in the Vesterbro neighbourhood in 2023, the store has been designed by Dorte Mandrup with IKEA to suit the behaviours of urban consumers.

It will be easily accessible by foot or by bike and topped with a tree-lined roof that will offer "much-needed green space to the busy centre" of the capital city.

An aerial visual of an IKEA store in Copenhagen
Top image: Dorte Mandrup has unveiled visuals of IKEA Copenhagen. Above: it will be topped by a rooftop park

"Vesterbro is a densely populated and active district of the city that only has a few green pockets and walkways available," said the studio's founder and creative director Dorte Mandrup.

"With the new rooftop park, we want to give back a green lounge to the local community and create both intimate resting places and opportunities for spontaneous meetings," she added.

"From the top of the roof, you have a beautiful undisturbed view over Vesterbro, the canal, and the inner city."

A visual of a city-centre IKEA store
It will be accessible by bike or by foot

Externally, the Copenhagen IKEA store will be distinguished a wavy white facade, designed by Dorte Mandrup to challenge the traditional classic blue and yellow facing of other IKEA stores.

The facade intends to evoke a curtain, with folds that open to reveal product displays and lifts to create shaded seating areas at street level.

"The facade draws inspiration from a white curtain motif," explained Mandrup.

"Flowing down from the edges of the rooftop park, the curtain is pulled aside in a few places, revealing the displayed items in-side. The curtain ends in a pedestal on street level where you can take a short rest in the midday sun in between the rippled folds."

Once complete, the store will be accessed by a plaza that bridges over nearby train tracks and doubles as another public green space.

This plaza will also house a cafe, parking spaces for hundreds of bicycles and IKEA cargo bikes, alongside access routes to a new bus terminal.

The proposed entrance to IKEA Copenhagen
The entrance plaza will contain bike stores

By encouraging visitors to use sustainable transport methods, the store is intended to support Copenhagen's aim of being the first carbon-neutral city in the world by 2025.

The public rooftop will also be accessible directly from the plaza. The rooftop's landscape design will include native trees, shrubs and grasses, alongside bug hotels to encourage biodiversity.

The store will be complete with greenery on the facade and 1,450-square-metres of solar panels to generate electricity. Water from the local canals will also be reused to help cool the store.

Dorte Mandrup's hope is for the store to achieve BREEAM outstanding certification, which is the highest rating attainable using the sustainability assessment method.

Danish architect Mandrup founded her eponymous studio Dorte Mandrup in Copenhagen in 1999. Other recent projects by the studio include proposals include the Exilmuseum Berlin and an Arctic whale-watching facility that will appear to "grow out of the landscape".

IKEA Copenhagen is the latest in a string of smaller city-centre stores being developed by IKEA in its move away from its traditional warehouse sites to better accommodate its urban customers. Querkraft Architekten is developing a branch in Vienna Westbahnhof with the Swedish furniture giant that will not have any car parking spaces.

Visuals are by Dorte Mandrup.