Ikea Aims to Make It Chic to Pay Low Prices : Furniture: The new Burbank store is off to a good start but has to convince customers that $129 sofa beds won’t draw derisive chuckles.

Burbank, a city that for decades has been lampooned on national television as a haven for unsophisticates, would seem a tough place to launch a store that seeks to make it chic to buy low-priced furniture.

But strategists at Ikea, the giant Swedish furniture retailer that opened a store in downtown Burbank on Nov. 7, felt that a massive advertising campaign could polish any dull spots left on the city’s reputation by comedian Johnny Carson and others.

“We knew about the jokes about Burbank,” said Rene Hausler, president of Ikea U.S. West, “but we didn’t think that would have an effect on our plans.”

The results of the store’s six-day “grand opening” suggest that Ikea officials have calculated correctly. More than 146,000 shoppers thronged to the store in downtown Burbank and spent $2 million on modern, Scandinavian-style furniture, an Ikea spokeswoman said.

Now comes the tougher task: to convince Southern Californians that such items as $129 sofa beds and $5 stereo speaker stands are not only wise investments but are furnishings that won’t draw derisive chuckles from one’s peers.

“By tying in with the Scandinavian cachet, which carries with it an image of quality and clean design, I think they’re off to a good start,” said David R. Brown, president of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

But a handful of devotees won’t do. Ikea’s Burbank store, with 240,000 square feet--the size of five football fields--needs large numbers of shoppers to be a success. During the heavily promoted opening, customers at times waited more than one hour to get inside the flashy blue and yellow store.

But in the week since, crowds have dwindled dramatically. One evening last week the parking garage was only one-third filled. Hausler declined to give attendance or sales figures beyond the six-day opening.

Before the opening, Hausler and other Ikea officials said their typical customer was 25 to 45 years old and had a household income of $35,000--still-struggling baby boomers.

Spokeswoman Cynthia Newman said that in a pre-opening mailing of 1.6 million catalogues to homes throughout Los Angeles, “We made it a point to blanket ZIP codes surrounding UCLA and Cal State Northridge.” Apparently as a result, Hausler has lowered the target age group to 18 years old.

Indeed, on a recent evening, a substantial portion of shoppers appeared to be fresh from the college classroom. And small foreign sedans of the type favored by students dominated the parking garage.

Four miles down the road at the Levitz store near Glendale, Manager Robert Gladz said his store “definitely noticed a drop-off during Ikea’s first week, but things seem to be back to normal.”

He expects some competition from Ikea for accessory furnishings, but generally thinks that Levitz, long the nation’s largest furniture seller, draws a different clientele. “We have a lot of senior citizens and we also have a lot of minority shoppers,” Gladz said.

A far cry from the spare, unadorned look that Ikea trumpets, Levitz features overstuffed sofas and chairs and tables with detailing on top and legs; recliner chairs take up a large chunk of floor space.

Hausler said that Ikea doesn’t have a fix yet on where its customers used to shop but suspects they cover the range from Levitz and Wickes to department stores to Plummers International Contemporary Furniture, a long-established chain of smaller stores.

Although Ikea is the world’s largest furniture retailer, it is only the third store in Southern California to specialize in modern, European-style furniture.

First was Conran’s, which in 1989 opened a 50,000-square-foot ground-level store in the Beverly Center. Although Conran’s sells furniture for as little as $69, most of its items are priced higher than comparable items at Ikea or Stor, the third entry in the Southland’s modern-furniture sweepstakes.

Stor, which uses Scandinavian-accented spokesmen in its radio advertisements, opened a 200,000-square-foot store in Industry last year and subsequently opened a second store in Torrance.

Stor and Ikea keep prices down by limiting their stock largely to unassembled furniture that is packed in flat boxes. After viewing a maze of 110 display rooms at Ikea, shoppers enter a warehouse-like area where boxed items are stacked in bins. Almost everything can be taken home immediately.

Stor and Ikea also seek to lure customers into lingering by providing an in-house restaurant and child-care area.

All three chains are aiming for young urban professionals whose incomes have risen enough to trigger a desire to demonstrate their higher economic status in their home furnishings.

Industry experts say that many yuppies are stymied in their push to upgrade their homes by lack of knowledge of what to buy and by the distressing fact that their income won’t stretch enough to hire an interior decorator.

Hence the popularity of European-inspired furniture with its clean, symmetrical lines and black, white or monochrome color schemes that can be easily mixed or matched with already-owned furniture.

Said the Art Center’s Brown: “The popularity of these stores is due in large part that you don’t have to spend a million dollars to demonstrate that you have taste.”