“Toad, oh toad, take the old house and give me a new one.”

An English husband and a Korean wife, living in Dubai, decided to build a home in Seochon. Having spent many years outside Korea, the hanok was not a familiar form of dwelling to them, but something they encountered as if for the first time.

The site is an irregular plot with a long, tapering tail, resembling the stem of a pipe. While the northern edge facing the alley could have served as the main gate, the entrance was instead placed to the west in order to secure a south-facing courtyard and daecheong. At first glance, the surroundings appear residential, but in reality the area is densely occupied by commercial uses, including cafés, restaurants, and hanok guesthouses. The existing hanok had been extensively altered and damaged, making repair or reuse difficult.

While the project assumed new construction, the task was to respect the urban context embedded in the existing hanok and to shape an inward-looking domestic space set apart from the surrounding commercialized environment. The building’s placement and circulation were carried forward, while an additional level was added to secure privacy. At the same time, ban-chim were built up horizontally, allowing the density of daily life to be retained. The floor area and overall volume were calibrated to avoid excessive density, with spaces such as the numaru and bongdang incorporated to relieve the building’s mass.

‘Stacking and Clearing’

The ground floor is organized around the entrance, living room, and kitchen. The site of the former main gate was left open as a bongdang. Finished in earth or lime rather than wood flooring or ondol, the bongdang serves as a transitional space linking the alley, the house, and the courtyard. The former daecheong and kitchen were reinterpreted as a contemporary living room and kitchen, while the original hanok layout, which allows daylight to filter evenly throughout the house around the courtyard, was carried forward.

At the threshold where windows and doors meet, a stone floor extending the base of the building establishes the sense of a small yet generous courtyard. The dining table is placed at the center of the daecheong to fully face the courtyard, while the boundary wall is designed to be viewed not merely as a boundary but as an object in its own right. The stair is formed as a circular element, linking the house’s two other axes while maximizing spatial use. As it rises, it reveals the section of the house in full and becomes a lookout, opening toward the surrounding landscape of Bugaksan and Inwangsan.

The second floor is composed of an antechamber, the main bedroom, a numaru, and a bathroom with a shower. By exposing the rafters, the rooms are kept open and read as a continuous space, while the floor finishes vary according to the character of each area. The antechamber and bathroom are finished in stone, remaining cool in summer and retaining the heat of the ondol in winter, while the bedroom is finished with traditional Korean paper flooring to enhance a sense of warmth. The numaru is formed with a woven umulmaru floor, constructed using traditional methods.

In a hanok, emptiness is as essential as enclosure. Even within the constraints of a narrow site, the project sought to carve out spaces of release. On the ground floor, a depth of emptiness is created from the bongdang to the inner courtyard. On the second floor, the volume corresponding to the this space is removed and replaced by a numaru, drawing in light and landscape. Along the northern edge, no ban-chim is placed, allowing daylight to brighten the alley as a whole. These emptied spaces are intended to be filled again, with depth and a quiet sense of abundance.

‘An Unfinished Lineage’

The hanok we commonly imagine is defined by a spacious courtyard, deep eaves, an exposed timber structure, and white walls. Yet residential density within the walled city had already begun to increase as its population grew from the late Joseon period onward. After the opening of Korea’s ports, materials such as brick became more affordable and widely available, leading to the growth of hybrid architecture that combined them with traditional timber construction. Although many of these buildings disappeared through successive phases of urban reorganization, the practice of combining traditional building methods with new materials persisted, eventually finding expression in the urban hanok built on subdivided plots.

Characterized by brick firewalls, glazed doors, and sheet-metal awnings, these hybrid hanok represented an emerging urban housing type of their time. Seochon was one of the districts where they developed in particularly dense concentrations. Many of these houses were again lost to redevelopment after Korea’s liberation, while those that remained fell outside the image of a “refined tradition.” In this way, another face of the hanok, shaped by the realities of urban life, gradually faded from memo.

Within a small alley in Seochon, on an 84.3-square-meter site, the project seeks to reconnect with the context of the urban hanok that has gradually disappeared. Rather than reproducing a completed image of tradition, the project layers the time of the hanok, shaped and accumulated through urban life, onto present conditions. This constitutes a virtual continuity linking past and present, an unfinished lineage of the hanok.