IKEA IKONIC Is Opening to Everyone, and This Might Be Mumbai’s Best Sunday Plan on 27 September
A full day of food, music, comedy, design, conversations and creative detours is taking over IKEA Worli. The point is not to arrive knowing exactly what you want to see. The point is to leave having found something you did not know you were looking for.
The best Sundays are usually the ones that begin with a plan and end somewhere else.
That seems to be the thinking behind IKEA IKONIC 4.0. Now in its fourth edition, IKEA’s annual design and culture platform is opening to consumers for the first time on 27 September, turning IKEA Worli into a full-day mix of design, food, culture, music, creativity and ideas.
The invitation this year is simple: MAKE SPACE FOR WHAT YOU LOVE.
And thankfully, “what you love” has been interpreted very generously.
You can begin with a food workshop, wander into stand-up, stop for spoken word, find yourself listening to a conversation about how we live, get distracted by an installation, stay for music, make something, meet someone and then realise the thing you originally came for was not even your favourite part of the day.
A good event gives you things to attend. A great one gives you reasons to wander.
That feels like the more interesting part of IKONIC.
Design usually gets put in one box, food in another, comedy gets its own evening and music gets another. Here, they are allowed to bump into each other.
The announced voices include Aashi Adani, Abhishek Bhutwani, Aditya Lodha, Ahsaas Channa, Akanksha Deo Sharma, Amol Parashar, Ankita Chawla, Ankur & The Ghalat Family, Dishaan Gidwani, Guneet Singh, Imrun Sethi, Jasmeet Sood, Kenny Sebastian, Kevin Johnson, Mallika Dua, Mihir Ahuja, Nikhil D’Souza, Niranjan Hiranandani, Prachi Popat, Raunaq Rajani, Riyaaz Amlani, Sai Godbole, Saloni Kukreja, Shloka Nath, Utsav Kamboj and Zerxes Wadia.
It is a wonderfully mixed room, which feels right for a conversation about how people actually live.
Because design becomes much more interesting once you stop treating it as something that only happens to chairs.
A home is not just where your things live. It is where your habits, tastes, people, routines and obsessions slowly start leaving a shape.
The food you make when friends come over is part of it. So is the music playing while you clean. The chair everyone inexplicably fights over. The drawer filled with things you cannot bring yourself to throw away. The table that becomes an office on Monday morning and a dinner table again by Friday night.
That is where “Make Space for What You Love” starts to mean more than simply finding room for more things.
Space is never only square footage. Sometimes it is deciding what deserves more of your attention. Sometimes it is creating room for people. Sometimes it is finally giving the thing you care about somewhere to exist properly.
We spend years filling our homes. We spend far less time asking what deserves to stay at the centre of them.
There is also something genuinely fun about experiencing IKEA without the usual shopping mission attached.
Most of us know how that trip goes. You enter needing one thing. Somewhere between the room sets and marketplace, the original plan falls apart. A lamp appears. Then glasses. Then something inexplicably useful for a drawer you had never previously considered a problem. Hunger eventually intervenes.
On 27 September, the wandering is the point.
You can come because you want to hear a particular person speak and end up staying for music. You can arrive because you love food and leave thinking about design. You can come with friends who have completely different interests and, unusually, nobody has to spend the entire day politely tolerating somebody else’s choice.
The nicest thing you can give curiosity is somewhere to go next.
For one Sunday, IKEA Worli is giving it plenty of options.
Opening IKONIC to consumers also makes sense because the most interesting conversations around design have never belonged exclusively to people who work in design. Everyone has a relationship with space. Everyone has opinions about how they want to live inside it.
Some people just express those opinions through architecture.
The rest of us rearrange the sofa at 11:30 pm.
What You Need to Know
The consumer-facing day of IKEA IKONIC 4.0 takes place on *27 September 2026 at IKEA Worli, Mumbai. Registration is open to *IKEA Family Members.
If you’re planning to go, you can register for IKEA IKONIC here:
(https://www.ikea.com/in/en/stores/events/ikea-worli-city-store-mumbai/)
Go with a plan if you want.
Just do not be too attached to it.
