Kmart will open its first standalone K Home store in Box Hill South in Melbourne’s east on June 18, putting a new homewares and furniture format on the floor for the first time. The trial is meant to show whether the retailer’s home range can work as a separate store, not just a section inside a regular Kmart.
The timing matters because shoppers will soon see a physical version of a range that has largely lived online and inside existing stores. The Box Hill South site is designed with larger furniture, curated displays and room-based inspiration, a setup aimed at making the assortment easier to browse and buy as a home rather than as a shelf of products. For customers searching for K Home now, the answer is simple: the doors are about to open, and the format is unlike the usual Kmart layout.
Callum Smith, Kmart’s chief commercial officer, said the store would give the chain a chance to bring more of its home range into one place and learn more about how people want to shop it. He said the space had been designed differently from a traditional Kmart store, with a more immersive home environment and room-based displays to help customers move through the range more naturally. Smith also said Kmart had kept growing its furniture offer as demand had grown, and that the trial was about helping Australian families create a home they love at a price they can afford.
The new format also exposes a clear boundary in Kmart’s offer. Most of the items in the K Home store will not be sold in regular Kmart outlets, which makes the Box Hill South launch more than a simple rebrand of existing stock. It is a test of whether Kmart can use a dedicated home store to push further into the territory long dominated by Ikea, Amart Furniture and Freedom, while still keeping the value message that has powered its wider business. Jake Beckwith, a commercial agent with Colliers, said K Home was more likely to line up against those chains than Spotlight, and said Kmart’s brand and Anko label gave it a large audience online.
Beckwith said Kmart’s strength would depend on how quickly it could refresh products and how carefully it picked the right locations if the concept grows beyond the trial. That is the real gap left by June 18: Kmart is opening the first K Home store, but it has not said whether the Box Hill South experiment will become a wider rollout. For now, the retailer is betting that a more immersive home store can turn familiar brand power into a format shoppers will actually travel for.
