Landmarks for a store you can get lost in
MR D.I.Y Plus · Imago Shopping Mall, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah
The problem with a wide floor plate
A big store is not hard to design. A big store you can navigate without a map is.
Imago gave us a broad, relatively shallow tenancy — the opposite of the deep narrow unit most retail plans assume. Wide plates are commercially attractive because everything is close to the front, but they are disorienting: with no long axis to organise the store, every direction looks the same and customers stop building a mental model of where things are.
The response was to give the floor a set of landmarks. Not signage — architecture. Each zone got a distinct overhead event, sized and lit to be legible from across the store, so that orientation happens peripherally while you are looking at product.
Ceilings as wayfinding
Three reasons the identity went overhead rather than on the floor.
- It is the only surface you can always see. On a full shopfloor, sightlines at eye level are blocked by fixtures and people. The ceiling is never obstructed.
- It costs height, not floor. Overhead features consume no display area, so zone identity does not compete with stock — which is what makes it survive the first category review.
- It cannot be moved by the shop team. Floor-standing identity gets relocated the first time a promotion needs the space. A ceiling feature stays where the design put it.
The circular greenery ring over the beauty and essentials zone is the clearest example: a soft, planted disc that reads as "somewhere different" from thirty metres away, without a single word of signage.
A national format with a local accent
The template has to be recognisable everywhere and generic nowhere.
Rollout design has a standard failure: in the pursuit of consistency, every store becomes interchangeable, and customers stop feeling that the shop belongs to their town. The opposite failure is just as bad — bespoke every store and you lose the economics that made the format worth having.
We resolve this by fixing the system and varying the surface. Fixture chassis, module standard, lighting layers, circulation logic and graphic hierarchy are identical to every other Plus store. What changes is the specific content of the feature layer: which greeting appears, which geometry the ceiling event uses, which materials the thresholds are made from.
The result costs almost nothing extra — a ceiling feature is a ceiling feature whichever shape it is — but it lets a store in Kota Kinabalu feel like it was designed for Kota Kinabalu.
The store
