IKEA is pulling out of Bolingbrook after two decades and setting up shop eight miles away in Naperville, trading its massive 310,000-square-foot warehouse for a smaller-format store at the Block 59 shopping center. The Bolingbrook location will stay open until the new store debuts in late 2027, giving shoppers plenty of time to make one more meatball run before the switch.
The move was confirmed Tuesday, according to NBC Chicago, which reported that IKEA will close its Bolingbrook store and open a smaller-format location in Naperville. The new store is planned at the Block 59 shopping center, and will include a Swedish Food Market and Swedish Deli alongside the brand's usual Swedish meatballs. IKEA has not disclosed the store's final square footage, per that same report.
Not every outlet agrees on the numbers involved. The Bolingbrook store's current size is listed as 310,000 square feet, while the Daily Herald describes it as a 317,000-square-foot, two-story building. And while NBC Chicago says the Naperville square footage hasn't been released, NCTV17 reports the Block 59 location will measure 97,079 square feet — a figure that doesn't match an earlier 54,000-square-foot building described for the same Westridge Court redevelopment by the Chicago Tribune back in June.
A Corridor, Not Just a Relocation
IKEA's own framing suggests this isn't simply a move down the road. The WebWire announcement states that customers are increasingly living, working and shopping across the broader Bolingbrook-Naperville corridor, and that the new site remains within 30 minutes of IKEA's Schaumburg store, which anchors the Chicago market at 450,000 square feet. IKEA also said the relocation is meant to position it closer to growing population centers and a popular shopping district, a goal that tracks with the company's broader shift toward smaller-format locations.
That shift isn't unique to Naperville. IKEA has opened small-format stores in Culver City, California, and Phoenix, Arizona, and is building another small store in Gurnee expected to run about 66,000 square feet, where the village offered $2 million in incentives and anticipates $2.9 million in sales tax over six years, according to the Daily Herald. The company is also shuttering its small-format San Marcos, Texas, store on Nov. 1 after just a year, and the same report notes three plan-and-order-with-pickup stores in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. are slated to close as well — a sign that even the smaller-format experiment is still a work in progress for the retailer.
Naperville's Retail Pull Factor
The new Naperville store will sit at the corner of Route 59 and Aurora Avenue in the Block 59 shopping center, according to Shaw Local, which also notes the Bolingbrook store at 750 E. Boughton Road first opened back in September 2005. Naperville posted $257 million in furniture and electronic sales in 2025, up roughly 30.3% from 2024, per the Daily Herald — numbers that help explain why the suburb landed the retailer in the first place.
That retail muscle isn't new. Naperville has held the title of Illinois' top retail sales-tax generator outside Chicago since 2017, and in 2025 the city topped $5.7 billion in overall retail sales, according to the City of Naperville. To help close the deal, Naperville's City Council approved an additional $1.85 million tax incentive sought by Brixmor to attract a home goods or furniture retailer to the Block 59 Business District, the Daily Herald reported in June.
Shuffling Tenants To Make Room
Landing IKEA meant shuffling existing tenants around. The Block 59 store will occupy space formerly used by Going, Going, Gone, Discovery Clothing Co. and Ulta Beauty, per NCTV17, which also reported that Westridge Court and Block 59 together attract nearly 7 million visits annually, according to Brixmor vice president Rich Dippolito. Brixmor Property Group owns both the Westridge Court shopping center and the Block 59 restaurant and entertainment complex.
IKEA continues to test smaller customer formats while investing in home delivery, pickup services and its online experience, according to CultureMap San Antonio, which covered the San Marcos closure. That Texas store had been an approximately 35,000-square-foot small-format location that opened in July 2025 and stocked around 2,000 products for immediate purchase — a scale that gives Naperville shoppers a rough sense of what a compact IKEA experience might look like, even as the exact Block 59 footprint remains unsettled.
