Kingfisher's announcement yesterday that it had poached Kevin O'Byrne from DSG International to be its new finance director grabbed the headlines, yet its success in luring a little-known Dane to join the management team is far greater testimony to the gathering momentum at the DIY group.

From September, Peter Hogsted, currently the UK chief executive of Ikea, will head Kingfisher's international division.

Ikea has grown into a £1.1billion-a-year business in Britain under Mr Hogsted and transformed the way first-time buyers furnish their homes.

However, visitors to Ikea's head office you can see why the offer to leave may have been too good for Mr Hogsted to pass up.

He has spent the past five years managing Ikea's 10,000 staff in the UK from a prefab perched on top of a multistorey car park in Wembley, North London, an office space far removed from the images in Ikea's catalogue.

Yet Mr Hogsted, 39, is fiercely proud of what Ikea has achieved in this country. He has overseen its expansion and the launch of smaller format town-centre sites in locations such as Southampton, all the while dressed in his casual style of open-necked shirt and jeans.

“Furniture retailing in this country traditionally was not great,” he says. “Ikea has changed that.”

Mr Hogsted joined the Scandinavian giant in 1995 after seven years with the Danish Co-op.

After stints in human resources and marketing, he became chief executive of Ikea Denmark in 2000. He joined the UK business three years later and in 2005 took on the added responsibilities of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ireland and Hungary.

It is little wonder that Ian Cheshire, Kingfisher's chief executive, was feeling so happy yesterday. After snaring Euan Sutherland, Superdrug's chief executive, to run B&Q in April, Mr Cheshire has an executive team to rival any other in the City.

He told The Times: “I was looking at the top team that we've got just now and was thinking it looks really strong.”

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