We design the places where a business meets its customer.
YOI Design is an architecture and interior design practice based in Kuala Lumpur. We work across retail, hospitality and residential — but retail is where we have gone deepest, and it is what we are building the studio around.
The studio was founded on a straightforward observation: in most design practices, retail is a side department staffed by people who would rather be doing something else. It is treated as a lesser discipline — commercial, repetitive, constrained.
We think the constraints are the interesting part. A store has to open on a fixed date, hit a fixed cost, and start earning immediately. It is judged by whether people walk in, stay longer, and come back. That is a harder brief than most cultural buildings ever face, and it is measurable in a way almost nothing else in architecture is.
Our retail work runs from single flagship stores to multi-store rollout programmes, and from first customer-journey strategy through to sealed construction drawings, bills of quantity and site support. We keep all of it in-house because the detail is where the design either survives or quietly dies.
Cora Beach Resort, Sabah
Winner of four Malaysia categories at the Asia Pacific Property Awards 2025–2026, with three further Asia Pacific nominations.
YOI Design's scope on the project: the resort's interior design. Masterplan and architecture by the project's appointed architects.
Five things we believe about retail.
A store is an argument about behaviour
Every plan is a hypothesis about where someone will go and what they will notice. Make the hypothesis explicit and you can test it. Leave it implicit and you are decorating.
Design for the messy state
The store your customer meets is full, busy and half-merchandised by someone in a hurry. If the scheme only works on handover day, it does not work.
Detail is not a later phase
The decisions that determine whether a store looks expensive or cheap are made in the details, long after most design teams have left the project.
A format is a product
For chain retail, the deliverable is not a store. It is a system that lets the twentieth store be built well by people who never met the design team.
Constraints are the brief
Fixed date, fixed budget, fixed shell, landlord rules, a category plan that changes twice. That is not interference with the design. That is the design.
Want the longer version?
We publish our methods and measured findings rather than keeping them in a capability deck.
Where we work
Kuala Lumpur is the studio. The work is not.
Delivered projects span Peninsular Malaysia — Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Penang, Pahang, Negeri Sembilan — and East Malaysia, with a sustained body of work in Kuching and Kota Kinabalu. In 2026 we produced tender documentation for MR D.I.Y stores in Spain.
Retail documentation travels well. The module standards, drawing conventions and rollout logic are the same whether the store is in Seri Kembangan or Madrid; what changes is the regulatory wrapper and the tender format. We are actively building the studio's international retail practice and welcome enquiries from operators outside Malaysia.
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Come and see us.
C-1-1, Pusat Perdagangan Bandar
7 Jalan Bukit Jalil, 57000
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia