Studio

Hanok was founded in 2018 by Seo Ha-eun and Kwon Minjae, an architect and a fifth-generation carpenter who met, as the story is now told too often, arguing about a bracket. Seo had spent a decade designing certified passive buildings and had grown suspicious of envelopes that worked perfectly and meant nothing. Kwon had spent the same decade restoring hanok frames and had grown tired of beautiful houses that leaked heat like baskets. The studio exists at the point of that argument.

The workshop

We work from a converted timber yard in Cheongun-ri: drawing tables at one end, saw benches at the other, and no wall between them. Every project's joints are cut and racked here before the drawings are finalised — the carpenters mark up the architects' details in pencil, and the pencil usually wins. The yard also holds our drying stacks, two years of geumgang pine resting under a long giwa roof that doubles as the studio's weather instrument.

The people

Eleven of us: four architects, five carpenters, a building physicist, and Bae Jun-seo, who manages the yard and remembers where every board came from. The physicist, Im Dasol, joined in 2021 after auditing one of our houses and finding the model wrong in our favour; she stayed to find out why. Apprentices rotate through the saw benches every spring — architecture students learn to sharpen before they learn to specify.

The record

Fourteen houses completed, one longhouse under frame, and a drawer of measured data we publish with each project — the fullest accounts are in the project record. The Cheongun Passive House received the Jinrye Prize for craft in architecture in 2025; the Dumun Valley Annex was shortlisted for a national retrofit award we lost, deservedly, to a school. We teach a winter joinery seminar in the workshop, and anyone curious can simply come to the yard — the kettle is usually on.