Green Nomad is Natural by Design

The new showroom and cafe of South Korean studio RoMantico Design Factory (RMDF) can be found in a restored traditional Korean home, where abundant greenery and natural materials background a curated selection of design objects. RMDF’s founder Junyoung Heo shares more about his sustainable approach to the new space

Design Anthology: Can you tell us about the concept of Green Nomad and how RoMantico Design Factory (RMDF) is involved with it?

Junyoung Heo: Green Nomad is RoMantico Design Factory’s showroom and cafe. We wanted to create a space that reflected our sensibilities and approach.

All of us at RMDF really love nature, we see the value in the ‘old’, and we’re interested in processes of upcycling. In every one of our projects, we try to incorporate as much nature and natural materials as possible, and Green Nomad is a reflection of that. 

What is the overall size of the space?

The cafe and showroom is spread over three floors. The ground floor is 165 square metres and has a terrace, service counters, various types of seating and a sitting room. The second floor has another terrace, as well as more seating, and is just over 80 square metres, and finally, the 17-square-metre third floor has the rooftop garden, ‘cat room’ for our six cats, and an attic. Design objects and displays are spread over all three floors.

What’s unique about the building and the location?

Green Nomad is located in a narrow alley in the beachside neighbourhood of Suyeong in Busan. It’s more of a residential area, though there are some old factories, and the transportation options are poor. The location isn’t really fit for a commercial space, but we really wanted to use an old traditional Korean house and turn it into our vision of a nature-friendly cafe. 

How did you approach the project — what design references did you try to incorporate into the space?

We always draw inspiration from nature. Our goal was really to preserve the shape of the old house, naturally rather than artificially. For that reason, we used unprocessed natural materials throughout. We used recycled wood for the flooring and kept the concrete walls bare of paint or wallpaper.

Please tell us a little about the material choices for the space. 

We’ve observed just much material waste there is during construction, and we wanted to revive the value of those waste materials. We made an effort to make sure that the revived materials stand out and appear as natural as possible.

Please tell us about some of the custom pieces for the space.

Due to urban development here in South Korea, many traditional Korean houses have been demolished to make way for the new. But we see those demolished buildings in a different light. We used to go into those demolished spaces, because we felt sorry that the spaces and their stories were disappearing, and we wanted to remember them.

For example, there was a historic house that was built in the 1920s, during the Japanese colonial rule. We often used to see the house, and one day we heard the news that the house was going to be demolished. So we decided to go into the house before it was demolished and salvage the wood from the floors, windows and doors. That wood is now given new life as the furniture in Green Nomad, which we designed and built ourselves from this repurposed wood.

Images / Jeong Hee Won and Siyoon Seok