An in-depth look at Ikea's Home Smart business, which has shifted from being a hobby to a core part of its future
The Swedish furniture giant has conquered living rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms — but can it hang on to the future of the home? — Björn Block hurries out of the Ikea Museum …
Context & Ripple Effects
Weeks before this feature ran, Ikea created a dedicated Home smart business unit with end-to-end responsibility for its connected devices — the organizational signal that smart lighting and sensors were no longer a side experiment. The Verge's profile of unit lead Björn Block is the ground-level look at what that promotion means inside the company.
The arc since has validated the bet: the Matter-ready Dirigera hub arrived in 2022 as the connective tissue, and Ikea now plans a full relaunch around more than 20 Matter-over-Thread devices starting January 2026, making its low-cost line work with other brands' ecosystems — with or without Ikea's own hub.
First-order effects
- Home Smart now owns the smart-device portfolio end to end, so connected features get planned into Ikea's core product development rather than bolted on by a skunkworks team reporting outside the main business.
Second-order effects
- Matter interoperability undercuts the lock-in economics of hub-first smart home rivals: if Ikea's cheap sensors and lights work with any ecosystem, competitors' recurring revenue from proprietary hubs comes under price pressure from the bottom of the market.
Third-order effects
- If the 2026 relaunch lands as planned, the structural endpoint is smart-home hardware becoming a commodity layer sold at furniture margins — with value migrating to whoever controls the software experience, which is why Ikea's own hub strategy and its gaps (no Trådfri migration tool) matter more than any single device.
The trend: Furniture-scale retailers are absorbing smart home technology from gadget category to default product layer, with the Matter standard deciding whether hubs or ecosystems capture the value.