I’m on the final week of my travels and I am spending it in Seoul, South Korea. This is a city that knows design. It’s bursting at the seams with beautiful apartments, instagrammable tea rooms, themed cafes, and painfully cool galleries.
There’s something different packed into every nook, and while it’s hard to quantify the essence of Seoul design, there are some standout elements that have struck me as particularly fascinating.
A hanok is a traditional Korean home. The original hanok design dates back hundreds of years, and clusters of them remain in pockets around Seoul. They are characterised by their wooden structure, elegant curved roofs, small size, harmony with nature, and “ondal” — a clever system that transmits heat from a central furnace throughout the home via a network of channels under the floors.
The influence of hanok architecture is visible in modern South Korean design, where there is a strong emphasis on efficient use of space, natural materials, and a warm inviting atmosphere.
Hanoks maximise their small footprint by being adaptable — they use open layouts and sliding doors, which remain common in modern Seoul homes and allow spaces to be multi-functional.
The use of natural materials and the focus on harmony with nature is reflected in a modern preference for wood, stone, and natural fabrics in light neutral colours, as well as a prevalence of indoor gardens or courtyards to maintain the connection with nature.
The warm floors created by the ondal was an inviting space for Koreans, and it remains common to sit on the floor in Korean homes — especially as most homes still primarily use under-floor heating. Traditional tea houses around Seoul have cushions on the floor around low tables, where customers sit cross-legged in a comfortable and relaxed atmosphere.
While most modern homes have sofas, you will often see Koreans sitting on the floor and using the sofa as a backrest! Korean furniture designers keep this in mind when creating sofas, ensuring they will be comfortable to lean against as well as to sit on.
Getting this low down means a clean floor is a must, and wearing shoes inside Korean homes is usually a no-no. The tea houses and homes I’ve visited in Seoul have slippers lined up at the front door, usually in easily washable PVC or rubber, making it easy for guests to remove their shoes and keep floors clean.
Seoul has a strong cafe culture, with coffee shops and tea houses everywhere, and the food scene is exceptional. There is an emphasis on shared plates, with larger bowls at the centre of the table and small individual plates upon which you serve yourself, creating a beautiful tablescape of various-sized bowls and serving dishes. Tableware is most often made from clay or ceramic, although more traditional bronze tableware (called “bangjja” or “yugi”) also remains quite common. Bronze tableware is highly durable and retains heat well, making them perfect for Korean dining. Creating bangjja is a specialised skill, and the result is a work of art.
Korean chopsticks are also unusual —in a departure from the more common wood or bamboo in other Asian countries, they are instead usually made from stainless steel. This stems from a tradition of ancient royal families using silver chopsticks, which discoloured on contact with arsenic and so prevented poisoning. Today, stainless steel chopsticks have the modern benefit of being reusable and therefore more eco-friendly.
If toilet talk isn’t for you then skip this last paragraph because we are about to get into it, no holds barred.
These are not unique to South Korea (Japan probably leads the way here), but they are fairly ubiquitous here. Every time I visit a country where bidets or bidet hoses are common, I’m struck by how inadequate toilet paper alone is. In fact, it’s gross, if I think too much about it. We need to bring back the bidet, and not the weird green things that plagued our homes in the 1980s — bidets have gotten a glow-up and we need to get on board.
Electronic bidets are small and fit neatly under the toilet seat. They have controls that are usually situated on the wall, or sometimes attached to the side of the toilet.
The controls range from a basic hose that squirts water to clean you after you use the toilet, all the way to heated seats, drying functionalities, music to accompany your toilet visit, and soft lighting to guide you to the loo in the middle of the night. Some even allow you to alter the direction, temperature, and intensity of the flow of water. It’s a luxury I never knew I needed and one I strongly feel we need to embrace in Irish loos.
