Cafe Seoripul

Cafe Seoripul began as a budget franchise cafe of about 33 square meters. On a tight budget of KRW 40 million, we renewed it and turned it into an independent brand, and from the start its sales ran more than three times higher than before. It is also an ideal case where that result came without compromising the design intent.

The client had already spent several years being ground down by the high-volume, low-margin model of a budget franchise. The goal of renewing the cafe in the same spot was to keep sales at the same level while raising the average spend per customer. The small room was pressed down by a low ceiling painted black, and an inefficient kitchen layout left less than seven square meters for the hall. Securing efficiency and beauty at the same time was the core task.

The site is a back street between Seocho and Gyodae stations, a district of law firms. It was such a tough commercial area that every shop was aimed at men over thirty. The workforce there is mostly male, but every office had at least one woman on staff. What they wanted was not cheap, fast coffee but a cafe that was delicious and beautiful. We saw the room for a higher average spend right there, and from the beginning we aimed to be “the only shop for the smallest audience.”

Demolition revealed a partition wall so flimsy that light from the ceiling fixtures next door leaked through, and the low black ceiling turned out to be surprisingly high. The concept was “rest within the everyday,” with a landscape somewhere on Jeju Island as the motif. So instead of a timber or lightweight partition, we rebuilt the wall in masonry, a method rarely used these days. It had to call a stone wall to mind.

The floor is laid with pea gravel, and at the center of the room sits a large table that holds an areca palm. The old name of the neighborhood happened to be Seoripul. We liked the sound of it and took it as the name. Stone, wood, grass: every design element runs through these three.

The facade is small, but we gave it architectural presence. A white elevation clearly set apart, so that it reads as a different building from the shop next door. The sign takes up a third of the elevation, yet the shop name appears only in white relief lettering in the right corner. The section on the left, which structurally had to remain a wall, was left empty as a margin, with a single modest tangerine tree. We added wood to a carefully calculated grid so the facade would feel structured but not cold.

Word spread during construction, which we had not expected. There was no other shop in the neighborhood like this white block of tofu. The construction site itself worked as a billboard. On the first day, a line formed at lunch. It was never a cafe that people traveled from afar to visit, but it became the cafe with the highest average spend and operating profit in the neighborhood. The design and construction cost was a little over KRW 30 million. Two months of sales exceeded it. Outside and inside, the space was modest and neat, and the result was considerable.

The smaller the independent business, the more its space needs to be made from a branding point of view. Unlike large businesses that can set aside a separate branding budget, for most small businesses the space itself is the only branding and the only marketing. If you do not start from the dry, familiar premise that sales are what matter in the end, even the client’s dream and a beautiful space will wither before long.

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