Personal Taste|Gahoe-dong 31 — Roofs Instead of a Skyline

The viewpoint at Gahoe-dong 31 is the sentence the drama kept cutting to.

From the rise, Bukchon’s roofs run downhill in grey-black waves and the office towers of downtown sit behind them like a second city that forgot the first one was still here. Personal Taste is an architecture romance. This is the argument in one frame.

Gae-in designs single-person furniture. Jin-ho drafts buildings that want to be monuments. Between those jobs is this slope, where a hanok roof and a glass tower share the same sky and refuse to reconcile. The series used that contrast whenever the roommate lie started to crack.

The lookout is public. It is also crowded after ten. Come earlier. The stone wall is low. School groups use it as a backdrop. None of that cancels the view.

You will not find a plaque for Personal Taste. You will find the same composition the camera locked: tile, pine, a distant high-rise, and a lane that drops toward the palaces. Stand there long enough and the plot feels small against the city it was trying to design.

Walk down toward Rakgojae after. The gate is only a few minutes away. The roofs you just photographed belong to people who still live under them.

Photo: Bukchon Hanok Village rooftops, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.