Reborn Rich | House of Baek In-je — The Hanok Where the Chairman Received Visitors

Come up Bukchon-ro 7-gil and the first thing you meet is the soseul-daemun, the raised gate built tall enough for a horse-drawn carriage. Behind it the house opens out in a way most Bukchon hanok cannot afford to: deep courtyards, a hillside garden, and from the upper terrace a view down over the tiled roofs of the whole neighbourhood.

This was Chairman Jin Yang-cheol's house on screen — most fully at the end of episode six. The Korea Tourism Organization also lists it as where Jin Do-jun faces his grandfather as the majority shareholder of Miracle Investment, a scene that only works because the room around them already looks like inherited money.

Look at the windows. Not hanji paper but steel frames and plate glass, because the house went up in 1913 under Japanese colonial rule and its builder mixed the two traditions on purpose. It later belonged to Baek In-je, a pioneering surgeon whose name it still carries. Seoul designated it a cultural property in 1977. Much of the furniture you see in the drama is simply the house's own.

Entry is free. Closed Mondays, otherwise nine to six, and guided tours run at set times. Thirty minutes is enough, and it is the quietest half hour available in Bukchon on a Saturday.

Stand where the wooden floor meets the open courtyard and you understand the casting: this is a house designed so that whoever sits at the centre of it can see everyone approaching.

Cover photo: the raised gate, by Jjw, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.