Pojeon House: A Curving Brick and Concrete Home Embracing a Central Garden

Pojeon House is a compact, carefully composed residence near Seoul that frames and protects a long-established vegetable garden while offering privacy and daylight to its occupants. The project places two interlocking volumes in dialogue with one another and with the plot’s existing green heart. One volume, wrapped in red brick, hosts the main living areas and opens generously to the garden. The other, finished in exposed concrete and polycarbonate, contains visitor accommodation and rises slightly to form a lantern at night. Together they form a single, embracing gesture whose primary spatial result is the protected courtyard garden.

The house was developed for an elderly couple who required privacy from the street but did not want to lose the daily contact with the productive patch they had tended for years. The architects resolved this program by presenting a blank, fortress-like face to the road while opening the inner facade entirely to the garden through sliding glass. The result is a carefully balanced composition that reads as both protective and generous. Pojeon House therefore operates at two scales: the public edge that negotiates the street and the intimate inner world that supports a slow, garden-focused domestic life.

The architecture is resolutely material and tectonic. Brick and concrete are used not as finishes but as defining structural and spatial elements. Timber and green tiles provide warmth and tactility inside. The project foregrounds how modest contemporary houses can rely on simple geometries and robust materials to produce layered spatial experiences that are rooted in habit, climate, and landscape rather than stylistic effect. This introduction outlines the core idea: Pojeon House is a small home that embraces the field and rethinks privacy as a findable condition rather than an impenetrable one.

Design Strategy and Site Response

Pojeon House takes its name from the Korean word meaning a house that embraces the field. The fundamental design move is simple: two curved volumes merge around an existing, long-standing vegetable garden. This configuration preserves the cultivated plot while creating a sequence of sheltered outdoor rooms. The curved plan reads as a protective embrace when viewed from above and as a series of articulated façades at ground level.

The house deliberately reads as a pair of solids. One faces the street with a measured, almost blank face, a strategy that reduces visual intrusion and noise from the roadway. The inner faces of both solids are glazed and open directly onto the garden. Sliding doors along the inner wall blur the line between inside and out and allow the occupants to inhabit the garden as an extension of their living space.

Form and Massing

The two volumes interlock rather than simply sit beside one another. The brick volume curves gently to create an elongated living, dining, and kitchen space. The concrete volume intersects at the northern edge, stepping up to accommodate a guest bedroom above and creating a small sheltered courtyard between the volumes where stairs rise. The result is a singular mass whose silhouette is defined by the repetition of curved walls and careful compositional rhythm.

Material Palette and Detailing

A restrained material palette anchors the project. The south volume uses red brick with white mortar joints, giving a warm, textured external skin that references regional masonry traditions. The north volume uses exposed concrete that reads as a cool counterpoint. Polycarbonate panels clad parts of the upper guest space to provide privacy while producing a lantern effect at night. Internally, timber ceilings and joinery create a warm envelope, while pockets of exposed concrete offer contrast. Small green tiles enliven wet areas and the kitchen floor, giving the interiors a tactile specificity.

Element	Material	Function
South Volume Façade	Red brick with white mortar	Warm textured skin, visual reference to masonry
North Volume	Exposed concrete and polycarbonate	Guest room, night-time lantern effect, privacy
Inner Glazing	Sliding glass doors	Connects interior to garden, allows cross-ventilation
Interior Surfaces	Timber ceilings, green ceramic tiles	Warmth, tactile finishes, visual layering

Spatial Organisation and Living Experience

The internal plan privileges an axial relationship with the garden. Living, dining, and kitchen occupy the bricked southern volume and run along its curve, providing continuous outlook. Sliding doors open the full width of this inner face. A continuous built-in bench runs outside the sliding doors, creating a semi-exterior threshold and a place to sit, work in the sun, or tend plants. The kitchen uses a compact galley arrangement, while the living area benefits from the gentle curvature of the room that focuses sightlines to the garden.

The northern concrete element contains a guest bedroom on the upper level and support spaces at ground level. A staircase housed against a curved concrete wall provides circulation and, together with the polycarbonate-clad volume above, frames the garden. At night the translucent upper skin emits a soft glow, animating the garden and providing soft ambient light to the courtyard below.

Environmental and Performance Strategies

Passive design plays a supporting role. The curved façades and overhangs moderate sun penetration, while sliding doors and ridge vents allow natural cross-ventilation. Thermal mass from the concrete and brick helps to stabilise internal temperatures and damp diurnal swings. The inner garden functions as a microclimate, cooling the immediate surroundings by evapotranspiration and providing a productive, biodiverse focal point.

Craft and Construction

The house uses straightforward construction logic: load-bearing masonry for the brick volume and cast-in-place or board-formed concrete for the north volume. Polycarbonate panels are used where translucency and lightness are required. Internally, visible joinery and timber finishes have been detailed to accentuate handcraft. The project favors local skills and conventional methods, which helps control cost while achieving clear tectonic expression.

Program and Use

Programmatically the house supports compact living for an older couple with occasional visiting family. The spatial logic focuses daily life around the garden and provides flexible guest accommodation. The arrangement prioritises accessibility, clear lines of movement, and a reduced need for mechanical intervention. The garden remains the primary programmatic asset and is treated as a component of the house rather than an adjunct.

Area	Primary Use
South Volume	Living, dining, kitchen; direct access to garden
North Volume	Guest bedroom, stair, privacy buffer from street
Central Garden	Vegetable plots, seating, microclimate

Architectural Analysis

The design logic of Pojeon House is a study in inversion: the public face is closed and measured, while the private face is open and generous. This inversion realises privacy not as absence but as selective exposure. Brick and concrete articulate different functions and moods. Brick provides texture, scale, and warmth. Concrete offers mass, structural clarity, and a clear counterpoint to the brick. Polycarbonate introduces translucency, creating a lantern-like quality that animates the garden at night.

Material use is disciplined and honest. The visible tectonics—mortar joints, board-formed concrete textures, and timber grain—make the building legible. Spatially, the house privileges lateral movement and visual continuity over vertical complexity. The curved plan organises activities along the garden and slows movement, encouraging lingering and observation. This promotes a domestic rhythm that is intimate and observant rather than performative.

Contextually, Pojeon House responds to a semi-rural edge condition typical of Korean peri-urban lots. The decision to produce a fortress-like frontage is pragmatic in terms of privacy and noise control, yet it avoids fortress-like urbanism by opening fully to the garden. Critically, one may question the long-term resilience of extensive glazing facing a productive garden in terms of maintenance and thermal performance. However, the use of thermal mass, shading geometry, and cross-ventilation mitigates many of these concerns. The project thus presents a calibrated balance between openness and control.

Project Importance

Pojeon House offers several lessons for contemporary residential architecture. First, it shows how small homes can prioritise landscape and programmatic continuity over purely formal gestures. Encircling an existing garden preserves cultural and domestic practices while producing spatial value. Second, it demonstrates that a limited material palette—applied thoughtfully—can yield rich architectural contrast and tactile variety. Third, it underscores how privacy can be designed as selective permeability rather than total seclusion.

For architectural thinking, the project contributes to debates about the relationship between house and garden, especially on plots where productive landscapes already exist. It asks designers to consider how architecture might accommodate pre-existing practices instead of replacing them. In a broader sense, the house is relevant now because many cities and towns are rethinking peri-urban living. Pojeon House proposes an alternative model: a compact, materially honest home that foregrounds ecological and social continuity.

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

Pojeon House excels in its simple, restrained composition and in preserving an existing productive landscape. Visually, the contrast between textured red brick and raw concrete creates a balanced material dialogue that anchors the house to place. Tactile interior finishes and careful detailing enrich the domestic experience. Yet the project invites reflection: does privileging glazed connections to a garden complicate long-term maintenance and thermal comfort in this climate? This constructive question does not negate the design’s achievements. Instead it highlights the careful negotiation between openness and durability that contemporary small-scale housing must master.

Conclusion

Pojeon House is a compact but thoughtful study in how architecture can embrace existing landscapes rather than erase them. The project demonstrates that even modest houses can produce layered spatial experiences by prioritising program, material honesty, and a nuanced relationship to place. Through the use of curving volumes, robust materials, and a strong axial relationship to a central garden, the house establishes a living arrangement that privileges continuity, care, and slow rhythms.

For practitioners, the house is a reminder that design decisions about orientation, material, and aperture have both immediate spatial effects and long-term implications for maintenance, comfort, and ecological impact. Pojeon House encourages architects to view privacy as negotiable and to consider how productive landscapes can act as primary programmatic assets. In doing so, it contributes to an ongoing conversation about resilient small-scale housing that supports daily life, local ecology, and intergenerational continuity.

Ultimately, Pojeon House offers a model for how contemporary homes can reconcile the demands of privacy, daylight, and productive landscape. It suggests that careful material selection, simple construction logic, and attentiveness to everyday practices can yield houses that are both economical and generous. As a compact response to contemporary living near Seoul, the project provides useful precedents for architects seeking to design with time, context, and care.

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