Barangjae Yemiheon

Barangjae sits at 870 metres on the Daegwallyeong ridge in Gangwon — a hanok stay with a Korean dining room, built around emptying and sharing. We designed the dining and lounge spaces, revised the guest rooms inside the existing hanok, planned the layout, and carried the project through supervision and management. Eungbok Chang of Mono Collection directed the project alongside us and gave the place much of its sense and its message.

The theme running through the design was borrowed scenery, and time spent facing oneself. Visiting again and again after the project was proposed, we wanted to make a place where nature and people continue into one another. We looked for ease in every part, so that the hanok would keep its own beauty while still holding enough of what surrounds it.

We think often about Korean aesthetics. Here we wanted to work on breathing. Furniture of simple form, softly made and softly placed. Patterns and materials that keep pace with the hanok and with what is outside it. Lamps and chairs made by hand, carrying something of the way a hand moves across the natural. And the restraint of the food itself. We hoped that in a place planned as one breath, a visitor might find some healing in the emptying.

So the work was not to make a beautiful room. It was to make an environment that gives someone time to feel themselves inside nature.

Throughout, we pictured the people who would come here to look after themselves. Hoping a day of rest might become real recovery, we kept asking what matters most in a room — and kept answering it again.