Following the successful launch of its first "urban format" store in downtown Toronto this past spring, IKEA Canada has announced plans to open a second — this one in the space formerly occupied by Sears at Scarborough Town Centre (STC.)

Scarborough's first-ever IKEA store is scheduled to open in summer of 2023 with more than 80,000 square feet of floor space... which sounds huge but is actually pretty tiny for an outpost of the Swedish retailer.

Similar to the smaller-scale store that opened in May at the base of College Park's Aura building, the new Scarborough IKEA will have more than 2,000 different items available for direct purchase, as well as food. 

Larger pieces of furniture, like beds and couches, will be on display for customers to order and have delivered to their homes, but you won't find (or have to navigate your way through) any massive warehouses on-site.

The STC IKEA will be smaller than your typical suburban big box, but much larger than one of the company's new "design studio" concepts within malls.

And yet, it will be located at a mall, sort of, replacing the old Sears department store at Scarborough's largest shopping centre. Sears, once a giant on the Canadian retail scene, famously shut down all of its remaining stores in late 2017 after years of struggling to survive.

IKEA's urban format stores are just about the right size to take over the many vacant spaces left behind by Sears across Canada, and it's possible that we could one day see more — though nothing has been announced at this point beyond IKEA's "continued Canadian expansion."

For now, we can look forward to Canada's second-ever urban format store opening next summer in Scarborough.

"This scaled retail concept brings home to life in a new way," said IKEA in a release when announcing the news Tuesday morning. "It takes the inspiring IKEA experience to the doorstep of urban residents and is proving popular with hundreds of thousands of customers who have made visits to the downtown store since it opened in May 2022."

IKEA Canada also announced on Tuesday that national store visits had increased by 123 per cent as of August 2022, with sales increasing about 1.3 per cent to reach $2.6 billion in Canada.

It remains to be seen how and if the new IKEA store will impact existing redevelopment plans for Scarborough Town Centre, though the mall's owner, Oxford Properties Group, has stated in the past that the shopping centre will stay intact as a new purpose-built community rises around it.