An interior design plan for the souvenir store “sagair”, which opened in conjunction with the renovation of the Kyushu Saga International Airport terminal building. The store features a wide variety of items including confectionaries, Japanese sake, ceramics, traditional crafts, and other products unique to Saga, as well as travel tools and original goods. The goal of the store was to create a space where not only tourists but also local residents who use the airport and the park near can gather, making the airport itself a destination and to lead the sustainable of local specialty. For this reason, the plan called for a space that would serve as a container for these various items, as well as a place that would be an extension of the airport’s existing uplifting feeling and extraordinary nature. 

The innovative part of this project was to arrange the entire space with fixtures with a sense of density, similar to bookshelves. When a person is placed in a space like a library lined with bookshelves, he or she can experience the pleasure of discovering and selecting a book until they reach the one they are looking for. Inspired by this which leads to creativity, we planned all the walls and fixtures in a grid-like shelving system to incorporate the store’s colorful product line as a feature of the space. In addition, the main fixtures, while having a height at the entrance of the store, are gradually stepped so that they decline as they go further into the space. As a result, while showing the overwhelming volume of products at the face of the store, a sense of openness can be felt as one moves deeper in the store. 

Simultaneously, by creating a sense of openness on the internal side of the space, the shop was designed to have as few blind spots as possible from the inside where the shop staff are, thus creating a coexistence of creativity and functionality. A sake tasting space was also set up inside, integrated with the cash register counter. All the fixtures, including the refrigerated cases, are unified in pale green, aiming to blend in as a background for a wide range of items from food to goods, and to act as a symbolic color for Kyushu Saga International Airport, which is surrounded by lush green wheat fields.