A Lynchian Dream: Haus Nowhere | Travel

A Lynchian Dream
Haus Nowhere

Words: Jack Shepherdson
Photos: Georgia Griffiths

Visiting South Korea for the first time in April, the country was a total dark horse. Flying in after two weeks in Japan on our way to London, I knew what I was in for at the first and last destination, but Seoul sat in between in the shadows. This is what I got when I arrived: cafe culture that rivals Sydney and a shopping experience that leaves the rest of the world in the dust.

South Korea loves the concept store - so do I. In a concept store, shifting product is a secondary purpose, the priority being enticing the visitor into an experience that immerses them in the brand. It’s storytelling, it’s worldbuilding; it’s letting you into the mind of the designers and showing the intention behind what they’re creating. Walking around Seoul we encountered concept stores from a huge range of different brands, primarily in fashion and skincare, but one easily stood above the others.

If you’ve walked past a GENTLE MONSTER store, you’d probably remember it. Yes, they sell glasses, but gigantic uncanny valley humanoid robots are their retail store calling cards. GENTLE MONSTER is an eyewear brand that sits under IICOMBINED, a South Korean design and retail company with a few other projects under their umbrella:

NUDAKE - tea and desserts
TAMBURINS - fragrances
ATiiSU - headwear
Nuflaat - tableware
GENTLE MONSTER - eyewear

They all share an avant-garde design language that’s very surreal, androgynous, imposing, biomorphic, and futuristic. To understand the company’s full, undiluted vision, you have to go to Haus Nowhere Seoul. It’s an incredible building that’s designed to make you question what retail architecture can and should be. Designed by South Korean architects The System Lab, the building holds the IICOMBINED corporate office in its top levels, with four retail levels from the ground up. The architecture is designed to represent the compelling, futuristic brand vision at every touch point, towering over the surrounding neighbourhood.

The skyscraper’s scale is mind-bending, looking like something from Dune from the outside. As you walk through the low, compressed doorway, the ground-floor retail opens to a high-ceiling, concrete space that presents their wares more like interactive museum exhibitions than retail products available for purchase. Immersive experiences unique to the current season of products play out across each floor. Dotted throughout each public-facing level of Haus Nowhere are their signature slightly unsettling but intriguing robots, blending human designs with robotics in a way that makes you unable to tear your eyes away, even to browse the current brand collections.

I love Nuflaat - it’s a tableware brand whose knives, forks, spoons, and teapot designs can only be described as bizarre. Wavy or pencil-handled cutlery are normal for Nuflaat, as are designs where the handles are SD cards, crackers, birthday candles, rings, or long red fingernails. What I’d give to host a dinner party where dessert is served with the cracker-handled cutlery, dumbfounding my guests with the absurdity of it all. Whilst some of the avant-garde designs are definitely ergonomic enough for daily use, being properly weighted and high quality, the extra surreal creations would be reserved for special occasions. I love that something as traditionally mundane as cutlery is being approached as an opportunity to think outside the box and alter consumers’ perceptions.

Haus Nowhere’s top floor takes the cake (pun intended) - it’s NUDAKE’s teahouse and dessert restaurant. The triple-height walls and ceiling are cloaked in heavy green curtains, contrasted with thick square purple chairs and tables. The centrepiece of the room is a beige alien robotic egg that rotates, standing about 20ft tall. NUDAKE’s teahouse offers a huge range of unique hot and cold teas for both dine-in and take-home, and Haus Nowhere steps it up with a menu of surreal desserts. We picked two to share, ‘Beauty & Beast’ and ‘155MM’. The former is an apple pie and ice cream resembling a rose head (apple pie) separated from its stem and thorns (ice cream and chocolate). The latter was a rose mousse gateau, blended with ripe nectarine, grapefruit, and apricot compote to create an ensemble resembling a patent leather shoe, alongside banana-lime compote and caramelised hazelnuts disguised as miniature bananas. Yes, it was delicious.

Sipping our teas alongside the robot, eating shoes and green roses, I was unsure if we were inside a Twin Peaks dream or a nightmare. Welcome to Seoul, baby.