Quiet Property

Spaces I Remember #5 — Quiet Property Spaces I Remember  ·  No. 5 This is one of those spaces that stayed with me — not for its scale, but for its singularity. A playground built by a successful man entirely for himself. For solitude, for thought, for evenings with a handful of trusted friends. A cave, in the best possible sense. Teal-green walls and ceiling, bottles of whisky and liqueur stacked almost to the top, shelves dense with objects — ceramics, curiosities, things brought back from places far away. This wasn't a decorated space. It was an accumulated one. Everything here had been drawn in over time, each piece carrying a fragment of its owner's life. At the center, a large, low white table. Not for meetings. Not for meals. Simply for staying. Light fell at an angle through an arched window. A carpet silenced every footstep. Bubble lamps glowed quietly on either side. The outside world felt slightly out of reach — which ...

Spaces I Remember #4 — My Mother's Living Room Every space I write about has been special to me in its own way. But this one is different. This one is closer to the heart. Unlike the other rooms in this series, this space doesn't live only in memory. It still exists, and I still visit it. It's my mother's living room. Which means it isn't a showroom, and it doesn't have the kind of consistency you'd find in a curated interior. The furniture spans decades. The styles don't always agree. And yet, to me, no space feels warmer, or more alive with the people I love. Studying space has taught me one thing slowly. A well-decorated room and a long-loved room are not the same thing. Magazine living rooms are flawlessly arranged, but my mother's living room has time settled into it. I still can't put that difference into words exactly. I only know that when I sit here, I sometimes wonder whether the answer to the "good space" I keep cha...

Rooms Remembered, Vol. 2 — A Master Bedroom in Hannam-dong This is the second entry in Rooms Remembered , a private notebook on residential spaces I have come to know, written in the spirit of a student rather than an expert. The first entry can be found here 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. This is one of those rooms. 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 li...

Spaces I Remember #7 Between Work and Rest — A Young Entrepreneur's Private Retreat in Hannam-dong The first thing you notice is the height. Many spaces have high ceilings. But the height here was not the kind that announces itself. Light moved slowly down the empty walls, and beneath it, the furniture sat quietly, each piece in its place. This unit at Sounds Hannam in Hannam-dong was put together by a young entrepreneur who had built his career at the center of Korea's fintech and IT industry. It was not, strictly speaking, a primary residence. It was somewhere to come down from the pace — a private retreat within the city, used intermittently and deliberately. In the living room, a Flexform Guscio sofa designed by Antonio Citterio. Its curved backrest wraps rather than supports — not a sofa for receiving guests, but for one or two people who want to settle in and stay a while. This was not a reception room. It was a personal lounge. The windows were large a...

Spaces I Remember #8 — The House Where Astro Boy Greeted Me Hyundai Hyperion II  ·  Hangang Riverside  ·  No Longer Standing The door opened, and before anything else in the house could introduce itself, Astro Boy did. Two figures — one tall, one small — stood arms crossed, looking up at whoever had just walked in. I was genuinely delighted. Before I had taken in a single room, the entrance had already told me what kind of home this was. This was a unit in Hyundai Hyperion II, one of the residential towers built so that every household along its river-facing line could look out over the Han. It no longer exists — not in the sense of demolition, but in the sense that it now exists only in memory. At the end of the hallway, above the two Astro Boys, hung a Damien Hirst spot painting — dozens of small circles, each precisely spaced, each a different, unrepeating color. It is, by most measures, a loud work. And yet in this house it never raised its voice. ...

Spaces I Remember The Temperature a Brick Remembers Hannam-dong 657-97, Seoul Hannam-dong 657-97, Seoul If asked to name my favourite building in Hannam-dong, I would answer without hesitation. This building, set quietly inside a narrow lane, announces itself differently from the moment you face it. The exterior wall — laid brick by brick in imported material — is not mere cladding. It is the building's entire vocabulary. By day, light is filtered through the perforated brickwork in fine, shifting grids. By night, that same wall glows from within. One surface; two entirely different lives. My work brings me into many buildings. Buildings with a strong exterior are not uncommon. What is uncommon is a building that deepens as you move further inside. Light through perforated brick The stairwell tells you immediately. Natural light pours through the perforated brickwork and renders the entire shaft i...

Spaces I Remember A Kitchen with a View, Hannam-dong The first thing I noticed wasn't the kitchen. It was the window. Getting to this house means walking through Hannam-dong's older, narrower streets — low rooflines, tight lanes, the kind of density that makes you forget, for a moment, that the river is close by. Then the door opens, and the Han is simply there, held in the frame of the living room. It wasn't hard to guess why the owner chose this place. The kitchen reads like a response to that view. A dark navy island runs through the center of the room, and in the evening, a line of recessed lighting settles softly across its surface. One run of open wood shelving breaks the cool material palette with a bit of warmth. And past all of it, through the glass, the river keeps moving. It felt less like the owner had bought a view, and more like they'd bought a way of living around it — carrying that same attention into the most ordinary room in the house. T...

Spaces I Remember · No. 9 Sometimes a home is remembered less for its space than for the people who lived inside it. This was one of those homes, at Hannam The Hill. The unit measured roughly 85 pyeong, with four bedrooms and three bathrooms. In this floor plan, it isn't unusual for owners to combine two of the children's rooms into one, trading a room for extra width. This family kept the original four-room structure — but reshaped its center around how they actually lived. The middle room had been enclosed in glass — walls and door alike — turned into a family room that stayed visually open to the rest of the home while remaining its own space. Inside, a music stand. A place built for the family to simply be together, and to let each other's daily life stay in view. Not a wall removed for square footage, but a room chosen for closeness. It told me, before anything else did, how much this family valued being near one another. The living ...

Hyperion II · Hannam-dong · Seoul Hyperion II Hannam — Notes on a Space — A space remembered. A space now gone. This is the photograph of my favorite space — the one that remains most clearly in my memory. It is not simply that the Han River view was beautiful. Something more particular was at work here: an integrity composed of many elements set in precise relation to one another. The owner's eye is visible in every choice. Let me look at the space one element at a time. I. The window and the river The panorama window holds the Han River like a frame. What is interesting is that the river is the protagonist of the living room, yet it does not overwhelm. The recessed ceiling light box softens the light from above, balancing the outside view with the interior. In most riverview living rooms, the gaze is pulled entirely toward the window. Here, the eye moves naturally between inside and outside. II. The eye behind the furniture The two chairs in the fore...

Spaces I Remember #08 A Quiet Property Field Note The Warmth That Worked: A House Remembered as an Office On a converted single-family home in Hannam-dong that no longer exists This space is gone now. But for a while, it held two lives at once — the life of a family home, and the life of an office where people worked, late into the evening, beside a garden that never quite stopped being a garden. A House That Became an Office The first thing I noticed, walking in, was not the tension of a workplace. It was the slower breath the house still carried. Through wide windows, the garden was visible from almost every angle. The hierarchy of a private home — living room, bedrooms, stairs, hallway — was still legible beneath the new function. The interior had clearly been reorganized, but nothing about it tried to erase what came before. That, in the end, was the quiet appeal of the place: it lived somewhere between a house and an ...

Working with Jin A few steps up from Hannam-daero, low buildings sit scattered among the pines, and the sound of traffic gives way, almost without notice, to birdsong. It is one of the few places in Seoul where “living in a forest in the middle of the city” is not an exaggeration. I introduce Hillside Residence to international clients often, and for a simple reason. The people who have lived here have been consistently satisfied, and what they valued was never the finishes. It was the air, the distance from the street, and the way the building is managed. At a Glance Address 54 Hannam-daero 36-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul Scale 5 buildings, 49 residences Completed May 2005 Floor area ratio / Site coverage 57% / 17% Parking 75 spaces, outdoor Unit mix Mainly 60 to 80 pyeong family residences, a small number of studio units, units with connecting rooms, and some with private terraces The floor area ratio of 57 percent explains most of the character of this place...