Some of the rooms I have walked through no longer exist. They have been renovated, sold, gutted, reborn as something else entirely. Over time, I have come to believe that someone ought to remember them. That a beautiful room, once it disappears, deserves more than to vanish into silence. I want to keep them — not as listings, not as transactions, but as one might keep a photograph of someone who has moved far away.
The space I am writing about today is one I visited in person. Liberty House in Hannam-dong, built by Hyundai E&C, is a quiet but significant building in Seoul's residential architecture. The unit I came to know was the largest line in the building — the so-called 1-line, with an interior area of 217.42 square meters (roughly 2,340 sq ft). Its master bedroom is, unusually for Korea, shaped along an elliptical curve.
I still remember the air of the room when I first stepped in.
The First Thing to Notice: The Wall Curves
Most master bedrooms in Korean apartments are rectangular. Rectangles are easier to build, easier to furnish, and more efficient in floor-plan economics. This room refuses all of that. The entire window wall sweeps in a gentle arc. If you look carefully at the photograph, the windows do not align in a straight line — they follow the curvature of the architecture itself.
A curved wall, in residential construction, is one of the clearest signals of architectural luxury. It is harder to build. It demands custom millwork. It often sacrifices usable square meters. The fact that the architect was permitted to design this way means the building prioritized experience over efficiency — and the experience, in this case, is the panoramic embrace of the Han River and the Seoul skyline beyond.
The Floor — A Deep Mahogany Conversation
The flooring deserves a paragraph of its own. That deep, wine-toned red-brown is characteristic of dense tropical hardwoods — most likely Merbau or Jatoba, possibly a deep cherry. These are not inexpensive species.
A floor this dark is a double-edged choice. Handled well, it gives a room classical weight and warmth. Handled poorly, it darkens and shrinks the space. This room survives the risk because the windows occupy such a large proportion of the wall, and both the ceiling and the upper walls are kept pale. The balance holds.
Personally, I believe these darker timber floors will outlast the current Korean trend toward pale white oak. They age into themselves, deepening rather than fading.
The Bed — A Contemporary Platform, Somewhere Between Cultures
The bed is a platform bed in dark wood — no box spring, just the mattress resting directly on the frame. What interests me about it is that it sits in a curious middle ground: it is neither the low Asian-style bed nor the towering American bed that rises nearly to the hip.
An American bed in the traditional sense — box spring plus a thick mattress — typically reaches 60 to 75 cm in height. This one is closer to 50 cm, with a barely-there headboard. The silhouette belongs to a different lineage: the minimalist platform aesthetic championed by Japanese brands like MUJI, by Danish makers, and by the resort architecture of Bali and Southeast Asia. It emphasizes the horizontal line, which is exactly what a room with a panoramic skyline view wants.
The dark wood side tables and their slim metal lamps look deliberately chosen as a set rather than collected over time. The overall effect is calm, almost hotel-like.
The Mirror Wall — The Room's Most Divisive Detail
On the right side of the photograph, you can see floor-to-ceiling mirrored panels divided into vertical sections. This is a detail that flourished in high-end Korean apartments of the 1980s and 90s, and has since largely fallen out of fashion.
The mirror wall does two things. First, it doubles the perceived space — the room, already generous, expands into something almost cinematic. Second, it pulls the exterior view inward; even when you lie on the bed and face the opposite wall, the river is still with you, reflected.
I will be honest: full-wall mirrors are a polarizing detail. Some find them dated, evocative of a particular era of Gangnam opulence. But in this specific room, the combination of curved wall + panoramic glazing + mirrored reflection creates something I would call timelessly theatrical. Whatever has happened to this space since, I hope this detail was not the first to go.
A Ceiling Fan, of All Things
The dark-bladed ceiling fan at the center of the room is an unusual choice for a Korean bedroom. Most Korean homes rely on air-conditioning alone. But in a room of this ceiling height and volume, air conditioning struggles to circulate properly. A ceiling fan handles the air, and visually, it gives the room a center point — an anchor for the eye in an otherwise expansive plan. The choice feels borrowed from American Southern architecture or from Southeast Asian resort design. Either way, it works.
What This Room Left With Me
What I remember most clearly about this room is not what it looked like, but how it sounded. Perhaps it was the curved walls. Perhaps it was the heavy curtains, or simply the altitude. But the room held an almost monastic quiet. We were in the middle of the city, and yet I felt I had walked into a mountain hotel somewhere far away.
If I had to write a single sentence the room seemed to whisper, it would be this: I am an island, floating above the city. Every detail — the curve, the panorama, the mirrors, the fan — exists to produce that one sensation. Of being connected to Seoul, and at the same time, a step removed from it.
I do not know what this space looks like now. But the silence of that afternoon, and the slow arc of that wall, I wanted to keep somewhere. Here it is.
A Small Glossary, for the Curious
- Platform bed — A bed frame that supports a mattress directly, without a box spring. Lower silhouette, more minimalist.
- Box spring — A foundation of wood and springs placed under a mattress in traditional American beds, raising the sleeping surface considerably.
- Merbau / Jatoba — Dense tropical hardwoods (from Southeast Asia and South America respectively) prized for deep reddish-brown coloration in luxury flooring.
- Full-wall mirror — A wall treatment using mirrored panels across the entire surface. Common in high-end interiors of the 1970s–90s; less so today.
- Curved wall (architectural) — A non-orthogonal wall element, typically more expensive to construct, often used to follow a building's exterior geometry or to frame a particular view.
The photograph in this post was taken by the author during a visit to the unit. The space may since have been altered. What remains here is a record of what was.
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