Be Here Now began as an experiment in co-ownership. The starting point was the duplex house model that became popular on the outskirts of Seoul, where two owners buy one plot together, build two attached houses, and share a yard. The question was whether that model could survive in a dense urban neighbourhood on a plot with a high land price. If two families purchase the land together, a workable site becomes affordable; if the lower floors are rented out as shops, the rental income offsets loan interest and maintenance; and above the shops each family builds a house that fits its own way of living.

The building, on a 160 sqm plot in Yeonnam-dong, Seoul, places three commercial floors in the basement and on the first two levels, and splits the three floors above vertically into two single-family houses. The two houses have the same floor area but entirely different internal arrangements.

The architect's own house is organised as one programme per floor: a living room on the third level, a kitchen on the fourth, a bedroom and bath on the fifth. Exposed concrete walls are combined with plywood and solid timber so that the materials read as themselves, the same approach the office takes in its commercial work, here applied to the architect's daily life.

The co-owner's house compresses kitchen and living room onto the third floor for an efficient daily routine, places the couple's bedroom and a future child's room on the fourth, and turns the fifth into a second living room, a lounge for records and reading that opens onto a terrace. Small details throughout the house were designed for the family's cat.

Outside, a single light-brick skin wraps the whole volume. The openings step and shift from floor to floor, tracing the different lives inside, while the ground-floor glazing opens the shop to the lane.