IKEA showrooms are designed to make you want to live inside them. Clean lines, warm lighting, furniture arranged to suggest a life slightly better than the one you currently have. In March 2023, IKEA UK took four of those showrooms in Birmingham, Bristol, Hammersmith, and Warrington and rebuilt them as the worst rooms in Britain, the cramped, mould-covered, unsafe temporary accommodation where homeless families are sent when the housing system runs out of answers.
What the Roomsets Showed
The four installations, titled Real Life Roomsets, were developed with Shelter, IKEA UK’s national charity partner, and placed specifically in the stores nearest to the cities with the highest rates of homelessness in the country. London, where 1 in 58 people are experiencing homelessness. Manchester, where the figure is 1 in 74. Birmingham, 1 in 80. Bristol, 1 in 183.
Each roomset was built from a real person’s account of the conditions they lived in. At Hammersmith, the installation recreated the experience of Sam, a mother of three who, after a relationship breakdown, found herself in a hostel with black mould on the walls, a persistent smell of cannabis, and security concerns serious enough that she moved out and slept in her car for seven weeks while her children stayed with a friend. At Birmingham, the roomset is a direct replica of the conditions experienced by a local resident named Claire.
The contrast with the surrounding showroom was immediate and deliberate. Every other space in the store was arranged to show aspirational domestic living. The Real Life Roomsets showed the other end of the housing spectrum, in the same building, to the same customers browsing the same aisles.
The Research Behind the Activation
IKEA commissioned research showing that one in every 208 people in England is currently experiencing homelessness, with 11 million adults worried about losing their home. One in five people in the UK said they were concerned about no longer having somewhere to stay. 18% had taken on extra work to hold onto their current housing. 17% had skipped meals in the past year for the same reason. 59% of UK adults believe the housing emergency is worse than it has ever been.
The temporary accommodation category depicted by the roomsets is technically provided by local councils when families lose their permanent homes. In practice, with social housing in critical shortage, families are placed in emergency hostels, B&B rooms, and cramped bedsits, sometimes for years, before being given notice to leave with minimal warning. Hilary Jenkins, Sustainability Business Partner at IKEA UK and Ireland, described this as hidden homelessness: a category of housing insecurity that most people do not see because it does not look like sleeping on a street.
The Policy Ask
The Real Life Roomsets were not a standalone awareness campaign. They were the experiential component of a coordinated lobbying effort. IKEA UK and Shelter are jointly calling on the UK Government to build 90,000 social homes per year by 2030. IKEA also formally joined Shelter’s campaign to amend the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill through a new Infrastructure Levy, designed to ensure that new affordable housing developments produce genuinely social housing rather than properties priced out of reach of the people the bill is intended to help.
Peter Jelkeby, Country Retail Manager and Chief Sustainability Officer at IKEA UK and Ireland, described the political argument directly: “The focus on building ‘affordable’ homes rather than social housing is a distraction from finding a real solution to the housing emergency, which currently relies on the unsuitable provision of temporary accommodation where families are being forced to live in uninhabitable and unacceptable conditions.”
Why the Showroom Was the Right Medium
IKEA’s showrooms function as a specific kind of persuasion. They are environments designed to make the possibility of a comfortable home feel accessible. That is the brand’s commercial proposition. By installing the Real Life Roomsets inside those same environments, IKEA inverted its own medium. The store that shows you what a good home looks like became the store that shows you what too many people’s homes actually look like.
The location choice compounded the effect. Customers who came to browse flatpack furniture and kitchen storage walked past a recreated hostel room built from a real family’s experience. The juxtaposition required no explanation. The argument was made by the contrast between what surrounded the roomset and what was inside it.
Campaign Name: Real Life Roomsets
Agency Name: Not mentioned
Brand Name: IKEA UK / Shelter
Location: IKEA Hammersmith, IKEA Birmingham, IKEA Warrington, IKEA Bristol, United Kingdom
