The hotel's bridal suite is free, but guests be warned: Oversleep, and you're likely to find yourself surrounded by several hundred shoppers checking out the bed linen and prodding the mattress.
Welcome to "Hostel Ikea" -- a startling if temporary foray by the Swedish furniture giant into the hospitality sector.
All this week, the Ikea warehouse in the Norwegian capital Oslo has offered sleepovers in its showrooms, free of charge.
Choices include a bridal suite, complete with hanging chandelier and a round bed, and a luxury suite that includes breakfast in bed.
Other guests can opt for the "dormitory" which, while lacking the relative privacy and opulence of suites, has the advantage of allowing guests to choose their mattresses from the wide selection carried by the warehouse.
With their wedding just a few days away and their savings exhausted, Alexander Augst, 28, and his fiance Angelica Brockme, 23, managed to score a night in the bridal suite on Tuesday.
"We're getting married on Saturday and spent all our money on the wedding. We have nothing left for a hotel and a honeymoon, so we thought it would be fun to sleep at Ikea instead," Brockme said.
Fun maybe, but not overly romantic. Guests are advised to bring eye masks and earplugs as the overhead lights remain on, though dimmed, throughout the night, and Ikea staff start moving palettes laden with goods between the beds from 4am.
"The lights, the noise. I think this is a once-only experience," was Augst's bleary-eyed judgement the next day.
One Norwegian family saw the event as an original way to round off the summer break. "Our three kids spotted the offer on the Internet. We were going to spend our holidays around Oslo and thought staying at Ikea would be a fun thing to do as a family," said mother-of-three Vanya Olsen, 35, in a bedroom with fake en-suite bathroom.
"It's cool that we're sleeping in a shop," said 12-year-old Emmely as her little sister Emilie, 9, ran excitedly around the showroom.
"It's cheap, it's different and we can shop before going home. I quite like that table in our room. Maybe I will buy it tomorrow," their mother said.
At 10pm, an hour before closing time, guests were welcomed by a bell-boy in red uniform as two chambermaids in black dresses and white aprons readied the mattresses. Bedsheets, bathrobes and slippers were also provided.
A free dinner of prawn sandwiches was served at 11pm before an employee read a bedtime story, which told the tale of a little girl who gets locked up in ... Ikea.
After a comfortable if brief night's sleep, the early wake-up time allowed guests, clad in bathrobes and slippers, to tour the the warehouse as staff busied themselves restocking shelves.
That was followed by a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and cold cuts in the store's kitchen department, before the store opened again to the public.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
OVERHAUL: The move would likely mark the end to Voice of America, which was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and operated in nearly 50 languages The parent agency of Voice of America (VOA) on Friday said it had issued termination notices to more than 639 more staff, completing an 85 percent decrease in personnel since March and effectively spelling the end of a broadcasting network founded to counter Nazi propaganda. US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) senior advisor Kari Lake said the staff reduction meant 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of US President Donald Trump’s agenda to cut staffing at the agency to a statutory minimum. “Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a
RSS