The former home of luxury furniture retailer HD Buttercup in Culver City is set to undergo a major transformation as Swedish giant IKEA prepares to breathe new life into the 40,000-square-foot commercial space, bringing its signature Swedish meatballs, modular furniture, and a new food court to the historic Helms Design District this spring.
IKEA will open its fourth location in LA at the Helms Bakery complex 21 years after HD Buttercup first opened its doors in Culver City. The new store will be located at 3225 Helms Avenue and will be the first ‘city-center’ format store for IKEA in Los Angeles, which consists of a smaller footprint and expanded food offerings, according to a report in the LA Times.
The new storefront will have over 4,000 products on display and like full-size stores, will feature room displays, according to a report in Patch Los Angeles. The city-center format reflects a smaller footprint than the firm’s full-size stores, which often exceed 260,000 square feet, but it is still larger than the plan-and-order storefronts, where customers can consult and order items, but items are not kept in stock.
While the Swedish conglomerate will be attempting to revitalize a commercial center that has a long and complicated history, the property sits in a prime location – just a few blocks from the 10 and less than 2 miles from the 405 – which may prove to be beneficial for the new furniture store.
The Helms Design District first opened in 1931 as a family-owned bakery and was quickly thrust into the public eye one year later. Helms Bakery became the ‘official bread’ of the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles and was awarded the first gold medal for bread in the 1934 California State Fair. According to a historical archive compiled by real estate firm Walter N. Marks Inc., which purchased the complex from Helms in 1972, demand for the bakery exploded in the next three decades.
By 1965, Helms consumed 780 train carloads of white and wheat flour annually. Over 2 million eggs were used monthly. During the holiday season, the bakery also became a significant consumer of fruits and nuts. The archive says that the bakery reached its literal zenith in 1969, when its products became the ‘first bread on the moon’ after supplying the Apollo 11 mission – just a few months before it closed.
Walter N. Marks purchased the complex three years later and has attempted to preserve portions of the former bakery, including the iconic ‘Helms Olympic Bread’ neon sign. The real estate firm has attempted to reinvent the complex for home furnishing stores and antiques since then, according to a report from 2009 in the LA Times.
When HD Buttercup opened at the complex in 2005, the founder of the furniture store, who had also co-founded the ABC Carpet & Home stores in New York, sought to make HD Buttercup a 100,000-square-foot showroom with branded shop-in-shops, according to a report in Business of Home. The brand eventually grew to multiple locations across California, but a majority stake in the store was eventually sold to Story3 Capital Partners in 2021, which merged the brand with Australian furnishing brand Coco Republic.
A press release from HD Buttercup from 2025 attributed the closure in Culver City to tariffs and economic uncertainty which resulted in significant disruptions to the store’s business.
Although HD Buttercup continued to struggle last year, IKEA has remained active throughout California in recent years. IKEA opened a storefront in downtown San Francisco in 2023 and plans to open three plan-and-order locations in the state in 2026, according to Patch.
A press release from IKEA from February said that the furniture store in Culver City is part of a broader regional strategy for the Swedish firm, which intends to open 10 new stores this year, and will build on the 14 retail stores that it opened last year – including one small-format store in Arcadia.
