UPDATE: If you haven’t heard, IKEA Malaysia is opening its first store in East Malaysia in Kuching! The small-format store — IKEA’s first of its kind in Malaysia — is scheduled to open in December 2026, becoming the brand’s fifth physical location in the country. Shoppers will be able to browse room settings, take select products home the same day, and still access the full IKEA catalogue online.
IKEA doesn’t have a store in Kuching yet. Until the first store opens in December 2026, what Sarawak has is a click-and-collect Collection Point: you order everything through ikea.com.my, and a week or so later you drive out to pick up boxes you’ve never seen in person.
I learned this the annoying way, driving around hunting for a blue-and-yellow building that doesn’t exist, before finding the IKEA Kuching Collection Point at a transport depot on Jalan Demak Laut 3, in the industrial park north of the river: a counter in a logistics yard, no showroom, no maze of room displays.
The service is IKEA Malaysia’s own, an official East Malaysia online store launched in February 2025 with a fulfilment centre here in Kuching, though the counter itself is hosted by a local logistics firm, Hexagon Highs Transport. Official or not, it strips out the whole in-store experience. If you’re furnishing a place here, IKEA is one option to weigh against the furniture sections inside Kuching’s malls and the secondhand groups that trade briskly in ex-expat sofas.
TL;DR
- Until IKEA Kuching opens in December 2026, every existing IKEA branch sits in Peninsular Malaysia. Until then, you can order IKEA furniture online and collect it at the Kuching Collection Point.
- The IKEA Kuching Collection Point on Jalan Demak Laut 3 is a pickup counter, not a shop: you order on ikea.com.my and collect once it arrives.
- Since February 2025, prices match Peninsular Malaysia and delivery is flat-rate: RM10–49 for parcels, RM49 by truck for up to 50 pieces, plus 6% SST, arriving in roughly three to ten days within Kuching.
- Worked example: about RM52 in truck delivery (under 5%) on a RM1,058 bed-and-mattress order, or a RM10 collection fee if you fetch it yourself.
- Third-party personal shoppers still operate for the thousands of catalogue items the East Malaysia range doesn’t carry, at fees that erase IKEA’s price edge.
- The real constraints until the store opens are the curated range (up to 2,000 products) and the lack of a showroom: you never see anything before it ships.
Is there an IKEA store anywhere in Kuching or Sarawak?
Not yet — but one is on the way. IKEA Kuching is confirmed to open in December 2026 as a small-format store, making it the first IKEA in East Malaysia. It will join the four existing branches in Peninsular Malaysia: IKEA Damansara and IKEA Cheras around Kuala Lumpur, IKEA Tebrau in Johor Bahru and IKEA Batu Kawan in Penang.
IKEA Malaysia confirmed in August 2026 that Kuching will get a small-format store opening in December 2026. Until the store opens, the Collection Point on Jalan Demak Laut 3 remains the way to get IKEA products in Sarawak.
How does the IKEA Kuching Collection Point actually work?
The Collection Point operates out of Hexagon Highs Transport at 922, Jalan Demak Laut 3, purely as a pickup counter with no shop floor attached. You don’t walk in and browse: you order online, choose the Kuching Collection Point as your delivery method, and you’re notified once your boxes have arrived. Collection carries its own small fee, RM10 plus SST for orders up to 50 pieces. (Miri gets a Saturdays-only collection point in the Emart Tudan car park.)
Opening hours are office-like rather than mall-like: Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm with a lunch-hour closure (two hours on Fridays), Saturday mornings until noon only, closed Sundays and public holidays; check before you make a special trip. Bring your order confirmation and ID, and a friend or family member can collect on your behalf if they’ve got the same details.
How do you order from IKEA to be collected in Kuching?
Switch ikea.com.my to the East Malaysia online store first, via the store selector or ikea.my/EMstore, because Sabah and Sarawak shop a curated catalogue of up to 2,000 products rather than the full range. Build your cart from that, then at checkout choose home delivery or Click & Collect at the Kuching Collection Point. Fees are flat-rate bands rather than a mystery quote: RM10 to RM49 for parcels by weight, RM49 by truck for anything up to 50 pieces, RM10 to collect at the counter, all plus 6% SST, so you can see the real landed cost and back out if the numbers don’t work.
Payment happens online, by card or FPX (Malaysia’s online bank-transfer system), and a confirmation email gives you an estimated collection window. It’s the sort of order most new arrivals place in their first month, once the practical business of moving to Kuching is done and an empty rental is staring back at them.
What does shipping to Sarawak add to the price?
Far less than it used to. Before the official East Malaysia store opened in February 2025, freight forwarders and shopper services routinely added RM150–400 to a furniture order and took weeks. The official rates are almost anticlimactic: parcels cost RM10 under 3kg, RM25 up to 25kg and RM49 up to 40kg, while truck delivery is a flat RM49 for anything from one piece to fifty, each plus 6% SST. Item prices themselves now match Peninsular Malaysia, which IKEA made a point of at launch.
Here’s a worked example from my own order. A MALM bed frame (RM599) and a matching mattress (RM459) came to RM1,058 for the items alone; truck delivery to my door added about RM52 with SST, under 5%, and it arrived within the up-to-ten-days window IKEA quotes for Kuching addresses. A rug and a set of picture frames I ordered separately went as a RM25 parcel and turned up in under a week.
Two timing caveats. Parcels are quoted at three to five days, but IKEA warns that port congestion can add another week or two, and truck deliveries outside Kuching (Sibu, Bintulu, Miri) run to two weeks. Plan around the delay, not the fee.
What is the IKEA personal shopper option, and is it worth it?
Some things you want checked in person before they ship: colour, texture, whether a display piece looks anything like the photo. And plenty of catalogue items never appear in the East Malaysia range at all. For both problems, a handful of personal-shopper services active in Kuching’s Facebook groups will physically shop a Peninsular store on your behalf and freight the boxes over; this was the only route before 2025, and it survives on the gaps.
You pay a service fee on top of the item price plus real cross-sea freight instead of IKEA’s flat RM49, so the price advantage that justified ordering from IKEA in the first place usually disappears in the process. It solves the no-showroom problem and the range problem at the cost of the point.
What can’t you get through the Kuching Collection Point?
A few categories don’t travel well. The IKEA Restaurant and Swedish Food Market don’t exist here at all: whatever shelf-stable packets make it into the online range, the plate of meatballs and the frozen-food freezer are off the table.
Made-to-measure kitchen systems and anything needing an in-store design consultation aren’t practical to arrange remotely. AS-IS clearance stock (the discounted display and returned items sold cheap on the shop floor) never makes it to Sarawak either, because it’s tied to a specific physical store.
The bigger constraint is the catalogue itself. The East Malaysia store carries a curated selection of up to 2,000 products, so whole wardrobe and sofa configurations you’d happily order in KL simply can’t be bought here at all. Parcels are also capped at 40kg and 1.8 metres a piece, which pushes most furniture onto truck delivery.
Is IKEA worth it if you’re furnishing a home in Kuching?
For small stuff (textiles, kitchenware, lighting, storage boxes), yes: shipping stays low relative to the price, and the range still beats almost anything sold locally.
For big furniture the fee maths now works too, RM49 by truck whether it’s one flat-pack or fifty. What remains are the two gaps money doesn’t fix: the piece you want may sit outside the East Malaysia range entirely, and until the store opens there’s no showroom here to sit on a sofa or check how a wardrobe door swings before you commit.
It’s the same hunt-and-substitute logic that sends people tracking down which supermarket branches stock imported groceries: you learn which gaps are worth chasing and which ones you just live with.
Most people furnishing a flat here end up mixing sources, a few flat-pack boxes for what nobody else stocks and the rest bought locally or secondhand. My bed came the whole way from a warehouse for a RM52 truck fee, and the first time I saw it was as a stack of boxes in a transport yard at Demak Laut.
Last updated: September 2026. Collection Point location, opening hours, ordering process and delivery fees checked against ikea.com.my in July 2026. IKEA Kuching store opening confirmed August 2026.