Reborn Rich | Gyeongwonjae, Songdo — A Hanok Courtyard Ringed by Towers

Stand in the main courtyard at Gyeongwonjae and look up past the curved tile ridge of the roof. Forty storeys of glass apartment tower, straight overhead. Nowhere else in Korea puts those two things in the same frame so bluntly, and that collision is exactly why a drama about old money surviving a new economy came here to film.

On screen it stands in for a Blue House annex — the room where the Soonyang Card creditors' meeting is held. Which is the joke, and the point: the state and the chaebol negotiating the wreckage of a credit collapse, in a building that performs tradition and was finished the day before yesterday.

It went up in 2015 in the middle of Songdo Central Park — reclaimed land, a planned city, a seawater canal — as a hanok hotel built in full traditional joinery. Timber frames, ondol floors, deep eaves, all of it new. Purists have opinions. It is still the most ambitious attempt at that standard anywhere, and in late afternoon the light coming off the surrounding glass lands on the wooden brackets in a way no historic hanok will ever give you.

You do not need a room. The gates are open, the courtyards are walkable, and the Korean restaurant and tea house take outside bookings. It now trades as Gyeongwonjae by Walkerhill, having been Gyeongwonjae Ambassador Incheon when the drama shot there — worth knowing if you are searching maps.

Go at dusk. The paper-screened windows light up warm and the towers behind go cold blue, and the drama's whole thesis about inherited power in a country that rebuilt itself in fifty years sits there in one photograph.

Cover photo: Songdo Central Park, by Bohao Zhao, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons — the surrounding park, not the hanok itself.