You've bought their flatpack furniture ? now buy the Ikea home to put it in

The exasperation of a weekend spent putting together a flatpack wardrobe or shelving unit may have been enough to put many people off the Ikea experience for life.

Nevertheless the Scandinavian retail giant has set its sights on a more substantial goal – the easy-to-assemble Ikea home.

Executives from Bo Klok, the housing development arm of Ikea, this week held talks with Southampton City Council on a development consisting of up to 40 one and two-bedroom flats in Shirley, a suburb to the west of the city.

The price of the flats, which buyers will not be required to put together themselves, depends on the cost of the land but the project would aim to provide a home for slightly less an equivalent two-bedroom starter home in the area, which costs between £100,000 and £130,000.

The sleek Swedish designs are a far cry from "prefabs" – the bleak moulded concrete bungalows hastily erected in the early 1950s to replace bomb-damaged homes.

The L-shaped apartment blocks are produced from mainly Scandinavian pine in a dedicated factory in Gullringen, in southern Sweden.

Each block comprises six flats designed to maximise light and space on restricted suburban plots. Each flat has 2.6m-high ceilings, extra-large windows and a balcony overlooking a communal garden.

As a moving-in present, Bo Klok (translation: "Live Smart"), provides an interior decorator from Ikea, furniture from the store worth £200 and a two-hour home visit from an Ikea trouble-shooter.

A joint venture between Swedish construction giant Skanka and Bo Klok has sold thousands of homes in Scandinavia in recent years. If the plans are approved, flatpacked homes will be shipped to the south coast where they will be assembled by specialist Swedish fitters in a five-month process expected to start early next year.

The council sees the project as a way of providing low-cost homes to frustrated first-time buyers, priced out of the market. The cost of buying a home in the Southampton area has risen by 105 per cent since 1995 and by 21 per cent this year.

The Hyde Housing Association would offer the properties to mainly young people under a shared ownership scheme.

Bo Klok's project manager, Joachim Blomquist, compares prefabrication technology to the revolutionary changes to car manufacture almost 100 years ago. He said: "Ford put cars on the production line and that is what we are doing with housing."