Is there an Ikea in Kota Kinabalu?

Is there an Ikea in Kota Kinabalu? No, there isn’t, but there’s something that’s almost just as good if not quite just as cheap…

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You can order Ikea online and have it delivered in Kota Kinabalu. If it can be shipped as a parcel (weight and size restrictions apply), then it’s just an extra RM100. Otherwise you can have it delivered by truck or fetch it from the click-and-collect point, but that will costs quite a bit extra. Click here to go to the Ikea Delivery Service page to find out more.

The rest of the article was accurate when it was first published in 2008 – I’ve left it here in case you want to reminisice about the Kota Kinabalu of the past….

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Towards the afternoon of New Year’s Day, the Journo and I were strolling through Warisan Square in Kota Kinabalu, around the 3rd floor of the inside shopping area, when we came across a store neither of us have noticed before. It was a fairly big open space, with some funky looking furniture in it.

Some assembly required. The store, not the furniture.

We’re forever looking for proper furniture, so it grabbed our attention. We walked in. It’s then that we noticed, as we recently returned from Kuala Lumpur and visited the Ikea there, that much of the products they had on display looked familiar. A closer look revealed that most, if not all, of this store’s products were from Ikea. I, for one, was happy as I’m sure many others would be too.

This new shop in Kota Kinabalu, that sells Ikea products, named Living Concept, is on the 3rd floor of Warisan Square. It’s probably not affiliated with Ikea, but the shop stocks mostly, or entirely, Ikea products. The ones that we recognised were slightly more expensive than what we remember them from the Kuala Lumpur Ikea, but not a lot more.

There was a whole bunch of stuff at Ikea in Kuala Lumpur that tickled my fancy, but the cost of shipping would have made it a ridiculous buy. But here we were, in a shop in Warisan Square right here in Kota Kinabalu, facing all these Ikea products.

We browsed through the shop and saw some interesting things. The variety was a bit limited though, so in the end, we left not having seen anything that I really needed.

Last night, however (and here’s a hot tip), after we watched a movie, on our way to Starbucks, we saw them offloading a very big shipping container that was full of more Ikea products.

Update: Since then, Living Concept has come and gone like many other half-baked ideas before it, but people behind Facebook pages like Ikea 4 Sabah and have stepped up to bring in Ikea products for roughly 20% extra.