ILVA, the Danish home furnishings retailer, will launch in Britain next week with the goal of becoming one of the top five industry players within two years.

Martin Toogood, chief executive, said that Ilva would rival John Lewis in terms of sales over the next two to three years. John Lewis, the UK’s third-biggest furniture and home furnishings retailer with a market share of 3.9 per cent, recorded sales of about £1 billion last year.

Ilva, which is opening its first 120,000 sq ft store in Lakeside, Thurrock, next week, with stores to follow in Gateshead, Reading and Manchester, is aiming to have 20 outlets in the UK by 2016.

Mr Toogood, a former chief executive of Habitat who has also run B&Q and Heal’s in the UK, bought Ilva in 2003 for a reported £67 million, with the backing of Advent International, a private equity firm.

He told The Times that it was his “mission” to make beautifully designed furniture accessible to more people.

He said: “The UK needs an injection of interesting retail products. Retailing in the UK is getting pretty boring.”

Analysts said that Ilva, whose 10,000 products are priced about 20 per cent above those of Ikea, would cover the middle ground between Argos at one end of the market, and Marks & Spencer and John Lewis at the other.

Jeffrey Young, of Allegra Strategies, said the difficult economic environment, which contributed to the demise of the furniture retailer Courts, as well as the crowded market place, meant that Ilva would have to battle for sales while trying to adapt to a UK audience. However, he said that in the long run, the value and quality of Ilva’s products should give it an edge and a good base from which to compete against rivals.

Speaking at the company’s Malmo store, Mr Toogood admitted that he was staking his reputation on the new experiment and insisted that he would take market share from rivals, despite current retail conditions in the UK and saturation in the furniture market here.

“It is a natural response from a category killer, and by any definition, Ilva is a category killer,” he said.

Previously, the company, which moved out of Denmark for the first time last year with a store in Malmo, Sweden, was run by the family of the founder, Jorgen Linde.

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