0914 Flagship Store
Seoul, South Korea
The flagship store of 0914, the own label of Simone, a Korean company that spent about thirty years making handbags for houses including Burberry and Coach before launching a brand of its own. TRU Architects and designer Eho won an invited competition with the idea of a village rather than a shop: small gabled brick houses carved into a pure white box, with the carving reversed inside so the houses push into the interior as shops and studios.
Seven storeys, three of them underground: leather craftspeople work in an open workshop below street level alongside a cafe and a gallery, and the brick stair to the sunken plaza was planned to double as a runway for fashion shows. The store opened in October 2015 in the luxury streets around Dosan Park in Gangnam.
TRU Architects
A Seoul practice founded in 2011 by Sungik Cho, who worked at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in New York and teaches architecture at Hongik University.
Architecture TRU Architects. Photography Youngchae Park. Seen via @architects_review.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched August 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.