A resort quiet enough to disappear between forest and sea
Cora Beach Resort · Sabah, Malaysia · Interior design · Asia Pacific Property Awards 2025–2026
appointed architects
3 Asia Pacific nominations
The setting
The site does the hard work. Everyone's job — architect and interior designer alike — is to not interrupt it.
Cora Beach sits on a stretch of Sabah coastline where forest runs almost to the waterline — a long sand beach on one side, dense green canopy on the other. The masterplan and architecture, by the project's appointed architects, set low white villas in rows within the vegetation, keeping the forest as the connective tissue between them.
YOI Design's commission is the resort's interior design — the arrival lounge, the villa interiors, the spa and the dining rooms. This story covers the whole guest experience for context; where the work is not ours, we say so.
What made the interiors straightforward to get right was the discipline already set outside: white render, timber, rattan, and one recurring move — the arch. We carried that vocabulary indoors, from interior niches to spa doorways, so a guest never feels the hand change between the building and the room.
Arrival
A gate, a lawn, and a building that keeps its voice down.
The arrival building — the architects' threshold sequence of white canopy, curved openings and timber-screened upper volume — sets the register: guests pass under the canopy, through the arch, and the resort opens up beyond.
Inside is where our work begins. The lounge interior carries the same temperature: tall arched windows dressed sheer, curved seating, planting brought into the centre of the room. Check-in happens in a space that behaves like a living room, because nobody's holiday should begin at a counter.
The villa
Each villa is organised around water and sky, not corridors.
The architects' villa plan puts the pool at the centre and wraps the accommodation around it. Full-height, black-framed glazing faces the courtyard on both sides, so the water is present from almost every room; an arched niche wall closes the vista at one end. A covered terrace under a rattan-screened pergola extends the living space into the planting.
Our villa interiors hold the same discipline the shell sets up — a sunken white lounge, arched niches, a cluster of woven pendants, timber and stone in a palette that defers to the light. The luxury is in the calm, not the inventory.
Shared waters
Two pools, two tempos — the architecture and landscape at work.
These are the architects' and landscape team's moves, shown here because no interior reads honestly out of context. The resort pool is a lagoon held inside a planted courtyard — palms rising out of the water line, a two-storey arched colonnade behind, shallow entries for children. It is the daytime heart of the plan, built for hours rather than lengths.
The second pool faces west. An arched pavilion stands at the end of the water and glows at dusk like a lantern, with a colonnade of palms and striped loungers running its length. Every resort needs one image that guests will remember it by; this is Cora Beach's.
Spa & dining
Back inside our scope — where the palette is allowed to turn warm.
The public interiors are YOI Design's work, and they shift temperature by programme. The all-day dining room is white and tall — a double-height volume under woven pendants, with a mezzanine gallery above. The spa turns inward and warm: terracotta-toned walls, arched doorways, sheer curtains filtering the light over treatment rooms. Same vocabulary, different register — the arches carry through both.
Recognition
Four Malaysia category wins at the Asia Pacific Property Awards 2025–2026.
- — Best New Small Hotel Construction & Design, Malaysia
- — Best Leisure Development, Malaysia
- — Best Leisure Architecture, Malaysia
- — Best Hotel Architecture, Malaysia
The project was additionally shortlisted as a nominee in three Asia Pacific categories: Hotel Architecture, Leisure Architecture, and New Small Hotel Construction & Design.
The awards recognise the project as a whole, and the credit divides the way the work did: the masterplan and architecture are by the project's appointed architects; YOI Design's scope is the resort's interior design — arrival lounge, villa interiors, spa and dining. We claim our part of an award-winning building, not the building.
The Asia Pacific Property Awards are an international, independently judged programme — which is precisely why we name them in full rather than writing "award-winning" and hoping nobody asks.
