Doha Festival City brought Qatar’s only IKEA and its first Harvey Nichols department store under one roof, a combination that positions the centre as the country’s broadest single retail destination rather than a specialist one. The IKEA opened first in March 2013 as a standalone 32,000 square metre anchor; the main mall followed with a soft opening in April 2017 and a full public launch in November 2018.
Developed at a cost of roughly QR 6 billion by Bawabat Al-Shamal Real Estate Company, a joint venture led by Al-Futtaim Real Estate Services with Qatar Islamic Bank and Aqar Real Estate Investment Company, the centre spans a 433,000 square metre site with about 246,000 square metres of leasable space and more than 500 stores. Monoprix operates the hypermarket anchor, with Ace Hardware and an NBA Store rounding out the major format tenants.
The entertainment program is unusually large for a Gulf mall: Snow Dunes, a 9,500 square metre indoor snow park, sits alongside Angry Birds World and Virtuocity, an e-sports and gaming venue, all reachable from an 18-screen VOX Cinemas complex that includes Qatar’s first 4DX theatre. In 2025 both Virtuocity and Angry Birds World were recognised at the Global RLI Awards.
Positioned along Al Shamal Road in Umm Salal, north of central Doha, the centre draws from across the capital rather than a single district. For a brand assessing Qatar, Doha Festival City’s combination of a full-format anchor stack and large-scale leisure infrastructure is one of the market’s clearest single-site benchmarks.
