Let’s be honest. You’ve been styling your home with Kmart finds for years, haven’t you? The rattan mirror. The bouclé cushions. That lamp everyone asked about at your last dinner party. Well, Kmart has clocked exactly how obsessed we all are, and they’re going all in.
On June 18, Kmart opens K-Home, its first-ever standalone home store, in Box Hill South, Melbourne.
It’s not just a section of a regular Kmart. It’s a whole 3,800sqm dedicated store for everything homewares, furniture, storage and styling, with a vibe that’s drawn more than a few IKEA comparisons.
And honestly? We’re here for it.
So What Even Is K-Home?
Think of it as Kmart’s home range, but given room to breathe. The store will showcase furniture and storage pieces that were previously only available to buy online, plus room-set displays designed to inspire rather than just stack shelves. It’s the kind of layout where you walk in for a side table and come out with a whole new aesthetic for your living room.
The branding has had a glow-up, too. Gone is the red and blue. K-Home has gone all-orange, leaning into a warmer, more lifestyle-focused identity that fits right in alongside the kind of home inspo content our feeds are full of.
Kmart’s chief commercial officer, Callum Smith said the store “gives us the opportunity to bring more of our home range into store and better understand how customers want to shop it.” Which is retailer-speak for: we know you love this stuff, and we want to sell you more of it.
The Anko Factor
If you’ve ever gone down a Kmart hack rabbit hole on TikTok or Pinterest, you already know the Anko brand. Anko accounts for more than 85 per cent of Kmart’s total sales, with over one billion items sold across Australia every single year. One. Billion.
It’s not just big here either. Anko is now selling in overseas markets, including the Philippines, in its own standalone stores. So K-Home isn’t just a fun experiment, it’s Kmart testing whether the format that’s working internationally can work here on home turf too.
The Anko range is what makes K-Home genuinely exciting. The prices are low, the products are on-trend, and they refresh constantly. Retail expert Gary Mortimer put it well when he said that “you’d have a Freedom shopper that’s now going to look at the Kmart home offer and go, gee, the products are very similar, potentially actually coming out of the same factories, but I can actually make my living room amazing for a fraction of the cost.”
Yep. That’s basically the entire pitch, and it works.
Who Is K-Home Really Competing With?
The short answer: everyone. Australia’s furniture and homewares market is worth around $19 billion, and Kmart is staking a claim. Harvey Norman currently leads with about 10.8% market share, followed by IKEA at 5.8%, and Amart and Freedom each sitting around 4.8%.
K-Home is squarely aimed at IKEA territory. Similar concept, room-set inspiration, flat-pack-friendly furniture, stylish-on-a-budget appeal. But where IKEA has you driving 45 minutes to a giant warehouse and eating Swedish meatballs before you’ve even found a trolley, K-Home is likely to pop up in shopping centres closer to where you actually live.
The Box Hill South store is actually in a former Decathlon space, which retail agents say makes this format easy to scale. It’s much simpler for Kmart to open a K-Home than a full Kmart store, which means if the trial works, expect these to spread fast.
Will It Come to Your City?
The honest answer is: this is a trial, and Kmart is watching closely. But the signs look good. Commercial agent Jake Beckwith described Anko as “a bit of a cult figure” and said Kmart has “definitely got a big target audience they can capture.” He also pointed to Kmart’s ability to refresh products quickly and pick the right locations as key strengths if the rollout happens.
There’s available retail space in shopping centres all over Australia right now, and a smaller-format home store is a much lighter lift than a full department store. If the Box Hill response is strong, don’t be surprised to see K-Home signs going up in your state before the end of the year.
The Kmart Tech Upgrade to Go With It
While we’re all getting excited about K-Home, Kmart has also just launched a new AI shopping assistant called Joy. Using Google Cloud technology, Joy lets customers virtually visualise home products in their own space online before buying, with a feature called “see it in my space.” Less guessing whether that rug is the right size. More buying with confidence.
It’s a smart pairing with K-Home. Browse in store, visualise at home, buy in app. Kmart is clearly thinking about the full customer experience here, not just the product.
Our Honest Take
Look, we’re not going to pretend we weren’t already halfway through a Kmart home decor haul before this news even dropped. But K-Home feels like Kmart finally giving its home range the stage it deserves. Big enough to inspire. Affordable enough to actually buy. Close enough to home that you don’t need to clear a Saturday for it.
The Box Hill South store opens on June 18. If you’re in Melbourne’s east, you already know what you’re doing that week.
And for the rest of us … watch this space. Kmart doesn’t tend to do things by halves.
