Ikea eyes west valley, but other stores come first. (Real Estate).

REPORTS surfaced in recent weeks that officials of the Swedish retailer Ikea were shopping the West San Fernando Valley and, in particular, Woodland Hills, for a possible store location.

While Ikea may be interested in expanding into the West San Fernando Valley sometime in the future, for now the company is just window shopping, officials said.

"Our focus right now is on repositioning some of the stores we have to better cover the market and be better representative of the Ikea store," said Pat Merwin, real estate representative for Ikea properties in the Southwestern U.S.

Ikea currently operates four stores in greater Los Angeles -- Tustin, City of Industry, Carson and Burbank. But two of them, Tustin and City of Industry, were acquired when the retailer took over the stores of now-defunct Stor. And none of the L.A. area stores are large enough to accommodate Ikea's full line of merchandise.

Before expanding further, Ikea's first order of business is to remodel two of its L.A. units so that they conform to its store prototype. To do that, Ikea is relocating the Tustin store to Costa Mesa and moving its City of Industry store to Covina. The relocation will allow Ikea to double the size of the stores, from about 140,0000 square feet to 300,000 square feet.

Once the relocation and remodeling is completed (a facelift is currently underway in Burbank as well) next spring, Merwin said, officials will be better able to gauge their market penetration and determine whether and where other stores might prosper.

"Once they're open for a while, I think we'll have a better idea of where our areas of expansion should be," Merwin said.

The privately held company operates 165 stores worldwide and 15 in the U.S. Its expansion has proceeded at a snail's pace compared to publicly held U.S. retailers such as Kohls or Target, but Ikea has recently become more aggressive.

"In the next 10 years, we have a goal to open five stores a year nationwide," Merwin said. "For us, it will be the greatest number of store openings since we've come to the U.S."

"With that expansion continuing, we're starting to look and be ready," she added. "Woodland Hills is certainly an area that we can imagine a potential store in the future."