Hanwol Forest, Seongsu — 100 pyeong | Living room

A double-height living room with a river view is the easiest room in Seoul to make feel like a hotel lobby. Everything the previous scheme had put in it was pale, and at that ceiling height pale reads as empty. We inverted the brief: a low black modular sofa laid along the window wall, a black stone table, a single arc lamp reaching out over the seating instead of a pendant dropped from four metres up. The stone and the plaster panel stayed white so the furniture had something to sit against. The result is a room that reads as furnished from the doorway, and where two people at opposite ends of that sofa are still obviously in the same room. Nothing here is loud; it is just heavy in the right places.