Drive down Helms Avenue this year and the reflex is to look for the antique lamps and the mid-century dining sets that have defined this stretch of Culver City since the 1970s. Instead you will find a building-sized IKEA sign where HD Buttercup used to be, and if you check the fine print on the store's own branding, you will find something stranger: the address technically is not in Culver City at all.
That detail is the real story here. Not that a big Swedish furniture chain is opening a smaller store, but that the most talked-about tenant in the neighborhood's most storied commercial complex sits on the Los Angeles side of a property line that splits the district in half. If you have lived near Helms for any length of time, that is worth knowing before your next conversation about it starts with "so did you hear IKEA's coming to Culver City?"
The Space Nobody Could Keep
The Helms Bakery building has been trying to figure out what it wants to be for over half a century. The bakery itself opened in 1931, ran its fleet of butter-yellow delivery trucks across Los Angeles for more than three decades, and even served as an official supplier for the 1932 Olympics. It closed in 1969, reportedly because the founder did not want the operation to unionize, and the 11-acre complex spent the following decades as a home for furniture and design showrooms.
Two attempts at reinvention have failed here in the last two years. Chef Sang Yoon, known locally for Father's Office, tried to revive the actual bakery concept inside the building in November 2024. It lasted about a year before closing in December 2025, with Yoon citing soft and inconsistent sales along with operating costs pushed up by inflation and tariffs. HD Buttercup, the luxury furniture retailer that had anchored the complex for years, also went out of business in 2025.
That is two straight failures in the same footprint, and neither was a scrappy startup. One was a nostalgia play from a chef with real local credibility. The other was an established luxury retailer with a built-in customer base. Both bet on curated and upscale, and both lost that bet.
What's Moving In
The 40,000-square-foot lot that HD Buttercup left behind found a very different kind of tenant.
| Business | Type | Status (per spring 2026 announcements) |
|---|---|---|
| IKEA Culver City | Home furnishings, ~38,000 sq ft | Soft opened April 29, grand opening May 2 |
| Hayama by WATAMI | Japanese restaurant | Announced for spring, no confirmed open date yet |
| Folks Pizzeria | Pizza, second location | Targeted for an April opening in the former Lustig space |
The new IKEA is a fraction of the size of a typical suburban store, which usually runs 300,000 to 400,000 square feet. It is the company's 11th California location overall and its first "city-center" format store in the Los Angeles market, built for a customer who is not driving out to a freeway-adjacent big box on a Saturday but stopping in on a weeknight. The company held a ribbon cutting on Wednesday, April 29, followed by a public "Unboxed Block Party" on Helms Avenue on Saturday, May 2, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with the classic art deco Helms facade left unpainted rather than converted to IKEA blue.
A company spokesperson framed the location choice around a shift in how Angelenos live now, not just where they shop:
"Residents spend a significant amount of time commuting and are increasingly impacted by affordability challenges."
That is a notable thing for a furniture company to say out loud about the neighborhood it is moving into, and it lines up with what happened to the two tenants before it. An artisan bakery and a luxury furniture showroom both asked shoppers to pay a premium for a curated experience. A compact IKEA is betting on the opposite: convenience and price, delivered close to home.
The Address Problem
Here is the detail most people driving past have never clocked. The municipal line between the City of Los Angeles and Culver City runs directly through the Helms complex. The Venice Boulevard-facing side of the property sits inside Los Angeles proper. The Washington Boulevard-facing side is Culver City.
The new IKEA sits closer to Venice, which makes it, technically, the first IKEA store inside the City of Los Angeles, despite the chain already operating locations in Burbank, Santa Monica and Arcadia. It will be branded IKEA Culver City because that is the name everyone already associates with the complex, but the parcel itself belongs to a different city on paper.
This is not trivia for its own sake. It is a reminder that "Culver City" as a lived, colloquial place and Culver City as a legal boundary are two different things, and the most photographed building in the neighborhood happens to straddle both. If you have ever wondered why a Helms Avenue business license or a parking citation on that stretch reads oddly, this is why.
The Other Two Arrivals
Hayama by WATAMI and a second Folks Pizzeria location round out the lineup announced for Helms this year. Folks Pizzeria is a Costa Mesa import, founded in 2019 by Joey Booterbaugh and Chloe Tran, and this marks its first expansion beyond Orange County. The company had targeted an April opening in the former Lustig space on Helms Avenue, a spot that has already seen its share of turnover in the last decade. Hayama by WATAMI was announced for spring with no confirmed opening date at the time of that report, so it is worth calling ahead before making a special trip.
Neither of these is a household name the way IKEA is, and that is worth sitting with. The complex is not consolidating around one type of tenant. It is layering a mass-market anchor next to smaller, independently run restaurant concepts, the same pattern showing up a few minutes away at The Culver Steps downtown, where national names like Erewhon, Sephora and Salt & Straw share a plaza with local operators like Laurel Grill. Culver City's commercial identity right now is less about picking a lane and more about proving that a value-driven anchor and an independent restaurant can share a parking lot without one cannibalizing the other.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you already know Helms as the place you take out-of-town guests for design showrooms and a good burger, the complex has quietly become something else this year. It is still historic, the rooftop Olympic supplier signage is still there, and the art deco bones of the original bakery building have not been touched. But the retail logic underneath it has changed. Two attempts at premium, curated concepts did not survive here. What replaced them is a value play from a company that said, in its own words, that it is responding to affordability pressure on the people who already live nearby.
That is a different story than "a new store opened." It is a signal about what this specific stretch of Culver City can actually support right now, and it is worth knowing before you make plans to stop by, whether you are furnishing an apartment, grabbing pizza, or just curious why your delivery address sometimes says Los Angeles instead of Culver City.
If you are thinking about what a shift like this means for property values or timing a move in this part of the Westside, that is a longer conversation, and one Isabelle Mizrahi and Coleman Eisner are glad to have. Book an appointment when you are ready to talk specifics.
