IKEA Brighton — Local services in Great Britain

Appalling experience doing a collection.

Emails state to go to the "red" car park at Churchill Square.

This is not sign posted, and is called the "Orange" car park on Google.

At street level, signs point to Churchill Square Car Park 1 or 2 (the official dot matrix signs indicating capacity).

At the Green car park (car park 2), there are no signs to indicate that you need to be in the Red car park for Ikea (that's the Orange one on google maps). Once inside the Green car park you need to pay £5 to get out again.

When you do find the 'Red' car park, its Pink, like everywhere is Pink, not Red. It should be called the "Pink hidden car park that doesnt want to exist". There is a tiny Ikea sign 40ft in the sky to indicate that you are in the right place (off the main road and up an alley way?!).

Once inside, after circling the car park for any indication of where to go, if you are lucky you will see a single line in a tiny dark red font on a pinky orange sign under the very large Exit font saying 'ikea collection from level 1', but nothing to tell you how to get to level 1...

FYI the ramp down to level 1 is in the far corner (with another red on pink Exit sign and nothing else). I entered on on what I thought was the ground floor.. so I thought Level 1 was up?!

Even the Brighton store page on ikea.com doesn't have any information AT ALL about how to collect by car.

All this is so utterly insane when you realise the franchisee running the Ikea store here owns the entire shopping centre. Whoever dreamt this up does not drive, hates humans, and is utterly...

Brighton has seen plenty of animal rights protests, so it would be funny to see so many humans scurrying around here like rats in a maze, if only we hadn't joined them against our better judgement.

The "cafe" is hard to find, hidden in a small corner of the labyrinth. Listed as a "deli", what we found is basically McDonalds with meatballs, and they didn't even provide plates. Ordering is a dystopian mess of screens and receipts, two for coffee (one with a barcode, one with a QR code). We shouldn't underestimate rodent ingenuity, but as a mere person I had to ask for help.

Talking of plates, we wanted to get some for our daughter but the selection is borderline non-existent. Most of the space is given over to things that would be impractical to carry from a central Brighton mall, so it's basically a showroom for things you'll order for delivery. We did get some ideas for the next stage of kids' furniture and Ikea does sell some decent, basic items (they show up on Amazon sometimes at inflated prices, which seems easier to justify after visiting the store.)

One pleasant surprise: the coffee from the machine is remarkably drinkable for £1.75, once you've cracked the system. Good baristas needn't worry, but a lot of coffee places screw up a £3.50 cappuccino anyway.

Since you're reading this review, yes we did make it out alive; I'm not sure exactly how we got out. We only rarely subject ourselves to the Ikea experience, so we may as well go all in and travel to the Croydon branch with a bigger selection and smaller crowds. Hopefully they have some...

Visited Ikea Brighton, looking at possible kitchens. We were frankly very unimpressed by business model of other kitchen firms. Opaque pricing, very refusing to give straightforward detailed costing or provide detailed working plans to take away to consider until after you pay.

Had kitchen planning appointment with Simon. Simon quickly produced a very good, sensible, attractive and reasonably priced plan. He immediately provided detailed drawings and transparent detailed costings.

Simon was patient throughout despite our multiple changes. Simon was informed, knowledgeable about products, and imaginative in finding solutions.

Simon listened accurately to what we wanted. Simon provided a clear, transparent and professional service. Simon did this throughout in a very warm, friendly, unpatronising and approachable way.

It was not in any way a problem that we might chose to replace door fronts part of order with alternative IKEA Metod compatible doors from one of a number of firms offering a wider range of materials and finishes such as Plykea. Other kitchen firms will not cooperate with this.

It is hard to see how it could be done better, I strongly recommend both IKEA kitchens and Simon their Brighton...