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kiakia.places

@kiakia.places

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Documenting living heritage & culture
across Malaysia and beyond 📓🌴
.
📧 For work: [email protected]
✏️ Kia Kia (hokkien): jalan-jalan/ to wander

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

There’s a word in Mandarin, “落后”, that means “left behind.” But Dabong made us question who’s really falling behind here. Named one of Malaysia’s 10 happiest towns in 2026 by DOSM.

This quiet corner of Kelantan sits at the end of a three-hour jungle train ride from Tumpat through paddy fields, limestone hills, and forest that feels ancient. 🌴🌳

And when you arrive, you understand why. The people there aren’t chasing anything. They wake up, they eat, they talk to their neighbours, they watch the sun go down. Life at a pace that feels almost radical now.

We’ve spent so long measuring happiness by what a place has, including the infrastructure, the options, and the opportunities, that we forgot to ask how it actually feels to live there. Dabong is a quiet reminder that those are two very different questions.

Maybe it’s not 落后 at all. Maybe it just never got lost in the first place. So, how do you define happiness? ☻

Follow @kiakia.places for more travel guides!

#kiakiaplaces #dabong #kelantan by @kiakia.places

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6 months ago

Johor Bahru carries many histories at once, formed through the presence of those who arrived and built here. We recently took a trip to rediscover its character, tracing its living heritage through details etched in the present.

@aesop’s first store in Johor Bahru pays homage to its history and architecture. Reimagining traditional interiors and domestic habits, the new space welcomes visitors to discover body, skin and fragrance formulations in an abode of sensorial respite. Aēsop Mid Valley Southkey, opening this mid-June.

#aesop #aesopmalaysia #aesopskincare #aesopfragrance by @kiakia.places

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4 months ago

We bought a 1963 National Geographic issue 📒 @natgeo — Vol 5: Storied Lands of Malaysia (Part III: Borneo).

Its pages document Borneo’s rainforests, rivers, longhouses and Indigenous communities at a time when much of the island remained largely inaccessible to the outside world. 🌳

Perhaps that’s why we enjoy collecting old books like these. They reveal how Malaysia was once seen.

Follow @kiakia.places for more travel guides ☻!

#kiakiaplaces #natgeo by @kiakia.places

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3 months ago

The family has Javanese roots stretching back six generations in Malaya, and the architecture carries an interesting mixture of influences. The original house followed the Malay rumah panggung tradition, with later additions taking inspiration from the keraton of Surakarta and Yogyakarta.

The original house was raised above the ground for ventilation, with separate wings for privacy and porches where people could gather.

We liked how naturally these different influences coexist. There are old timber walls, carved windows and furniture that have survived generations, alongside newer additions that make no attempt to disguise their age. There is even an iron bridal bed from the 1940s, old family photographs, handwritten notes and belongings that have been kept over the years.

It also made us think about how we tend to classify traditional houses according to architectural styles, when the histories behind them can be far more interesting. Here is a family of Javanese descent living in a Malay vernacular house, later incorporating elements of Central Javanese architecture.

And there must be countless kampung houses across Malaysia whose histories are just as interesting, if only we knew whom to ask.

That is what we hope to discover through Rumah Kampung Kita.

📍 @tanah.embahheritage1939, Sungai Pelek, Selangor

Follow @kiakia.spaces for more kampung houses stories ☻

#kiakiaspaces #kampunghouse by @kiakia.places

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7 days ago

We went to Gua Musang knowing about the limestone, but we didn’t expect the railway station to stop us in our tracks. An old platform sitting beneath cliffs this immense.

The old town, the railway, the limestone, the caves. The harder thing is simply noticing it, then giving people enough reason to slow down and look properly.

We also passed a surprising number of logging lorries along the way. Seeing truckloads of timber against a landscape this immense was a strange reminder that nature can look permanent right up until the moment it isn’t.

We want more people to notice Gua Musang, but just as important is recognising what gives the place its character before too much of it changes.

Would you stop here, rather than simply drive through?

📍 Gua Musang, Kelantan

Follow @kiakia.places for more places around Malaysia ☻

#kiakiaplaces #guamusang by @kiakia.places

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12 days ago

We’ve started noticing how much character sits in the parts of old shophouses people rarely look at for more than a second, the plaster flowers, ribbons, vents, borders and little flourishes above the windows.

Someone once thought a shopfront deserved ornament, proportion and a little visual generosity, even if most people walking beneath it might never consciously notice.

That is what we find so interesting, because these details were never only about decoration; collectively, they became part of how a street looked, how it was remembered, and how one row of shophouses felt different from another.

We love how something so small can slowly become part of a street’s collective memory, often without us realising it until we stop and look properly.

What other details did you notice?

Follow @kiakia.spaces for more stories on Malaysian spaces! ☻

#kiakiaspaces #shophouses by @kiakia.places

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18 days ago

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21 days ago

This is how community begins anyway, not with the word “community”, but with people choosing to return. 🍃

We keep thinking about the idea of the “third space”, or what some call a community living room. People are not moving away from malls altogether; we still enjoy them.

But as developments get larger and our lives more scheduled, there seems to be a pull towards places that bring things back to a more human scale, somewhere you can sit for longer than intended, or just let the children occupy themselves.

Even the drive out to Semenyih becomes part of it. We still remember our first trips to Broga Hill years ago. We think almost everyone in KL or Selangor has either done that Broga trip, or planned it and somehow never went in the end. The drive moves along fairly quickly, with long stretches of greenery making the journey surprisingly pleasant.

It’s really thoughtful when a place makes room for different kinds of spaces. A market, a workshop, a meal, an evening walk; each gives people another way to inhabit the space and naturally encourages people to slow down. ☻

🗓️ Throughout September, Majestic Labs is extending that idea through a different programme each weekend, from markets and workshops to cultural activities

📍@majesticlabs_ew, Eco Majestic, Semenyih

#kiakiaplaces #majesticlabs by @kiakia.places

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a month ago

The 121-year-old railway depot that could have disappeared. 🚂

There was a time when Sentul Depot was the beating heart of Malaya’s railway network.

Built in 1905, the Central Railway Workshops employed more than 5,000 workers at its peak. Locomotives were repaired here, railway components were manufactured, and for decades, it was one of the largest railway engineering workshops in Southeast Asia.

An entire community grew alongside it. Railway workers came from different parts of the world, bringing with them their languages, traditions and cultures. Over time, their communities took root, leaving behind places of worship that still reflect Sentul’s diverse history today.

When railway operations eventually moved away, the workshops were left empty. Demolition may have been the easier choice, but for those who understood its significance, losing a building that had carried over a century of history was simply unconscionable.

Instead, YTL Land saw something worth keeping.

Today, the workshops have taken on a different role. The Diesel Room is now home to @grumpybagels 1905. Workshop 2 now hosts padel and pickleball, while the remaining spaces continue to welcome everything from car exhibitions and fashion shows to weddings and community gatherings.

The best moment is when preservation can coexist with ordinary life, allowing an old building to remain occupied, useful and woven into the everyday.

Which ones do we choose to pass on to the next generation?

Find out more about the workshops at @sentuldepot! ☻

#sentuldepot #ytlland #kiakiaplaces by @kiakia.places

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a month ago

Meet one of the Tukang Kayu still keeping Rumah Limas alive. 🛖🌺

Elias Robani began learning woodwork from his father in 1984, helping after school before taking up the craft fully in 1992.

The Rumah Limas is one of Johor’s distinctive traditional houses, recognisable by its long horizontal ridge, descending rooflines and tunjuk langit. Then come the smaller details, papan pemanis, tebar layar, sisir angin and carved kekisi, each giving the house its particular character.

But what interested us more was the way the rooms were arranged. You enter through the serambi, where guests were received, before moving into the rumah ibu, with the kitchen further behind. The architecture followed the manners of the household, hospitality, privacy and daily routines were quite literally built into the plan.

Elias even built his own Rumah Limas in Kampung Parit Amat entirely from reclaimed timber, a project that took him ten years to complete. That stayed with us, because preservation is often discussed in terms of saving old buildings, while much less is said about preserving the hands and knowledge capable of building, repairing and understanding them in the first place.

That is why we wanted Rumah Kampung Kita to include the people as much as the houses, because somewhere between the two lies a part of Malaysian architecture that cannot simply be replaced once it is gone.

📍Contact En Elias at @anjungpurabina on TikTok

✏️ If you own a kampung house & would like us to visit, please dm us!

Follow @kiakia.spaces for more from our Rumah Kampung Kita series. 🪵

#kiakiaplaces #kiakiaspaces #rumahlimas by @kiakia.places

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a month ago

Do you still remember being a kid, pulling out a book because of its cover, reading the title, opening to a page someone else once folded, and suddenly finding that an afternoon had gone somewhere you never intended? 📓

Small libraries matter, and that was what we loved about finding these libraries in Sungai Pelek and Dabong. We loved how they make books accessible to others, especially children. They simply choose whatever catches their eye, settle into a corner, sit on the floor if they want to, and find solace in a world of their own.

Of course, almost anything can be searched for online now, even entire books in PDF form, but there is still something about a physical book that we can’t quite explain, the weight of it in your hand, the grain of the paper, the smell, the handwriting left by somebody before you, the accidental discovery of a title wedged between two others.

There is a certain freedom in browsing without knowing what you are looking for, and in letting somebody else’s words take you somewhere beyond the limits of your own experience.

These little libraries make room for that possibility.

📍Red Ant Library, Sg Pelek, Selangor
📍Perpustakan Desa Dabong, Kelantan

Follow @kiakia.places for more places around Malaysia! ☻

#kiakiaplaces #dabong #sgpelek by @kiakia.places

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a month ago

This is one of the most beautiful railway settings we have seen in Malaysia. 🛤️

We knew Gua Musang for its limestone hills, but seeing it in person was something else entirely.

There is something almost improbable about a railway station sitting beneath rock formations of this scale. The railway reached this part of Kelantan almost a century ago, with the Gua Musang sections completed across 1930 and 1931 as the line through the interior of the peninsula came together.

And there is still an old sign here pointing towards “Singapura”, a small detail we loved because it gives some sense of how far these tracks once carried people from this town.

We kept imagining what it could feel like with a little more attention paid to what is already there. A proper walking route through the old town, local guides, small businesses occupying the old shophouses, and better access to viewpoints and trails that lead into the limestone landscape.

With limestone formations this vast, caves, clefts and chimneys defining almost every horizon, it would be a pity if the town remained peripheral to the very landscape that gives it such a singular identity. Don’t you think so?

📍Gua Musang Railway Station, Kelantan   Follow @kiakia.places for more places around Malaysia! ☻

#kiakiaplaces #kelantan by @kiakia.places

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a month ago