Van Cleef & Arpels’ Seoul Maison | Jouin Manku

After Paris, New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo, the Jouin Manku studio has completed Van Cleef & Arpels’ maison in Seoul. For this new project, Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku were entrusted with the entire architectural conception of the building, the interior architecture and the design of every final detail. A complete project and a new opportunity to share a fascination for the world, as the studio celebrates its sixteenth year of collaboration with the exceptional French maison de haute joaillerie.

Van Cleef & Arpels is driven by savoir-faire and a demand for excellence, but also by culture and heritage, and continues to play an important role in the development of the decorative arts. Under the management of Nicolas Bos, we see a brand that is heavily involved in a range of cultural activities, from commissioning dance performances to sponsoring a school of jewellery arts. It is this commitment that has fuelled the Jouin Manku studio. These cultural alliances are interwoven throughout Van Cleef & Arpels’ commercial activity, ensuring the company’s status as a powerful purveyor of dreams.

This project seeks to offer Korea a Van Cleef & Arpels showcase, exposing its level of craftsmanship, its heritage and taste for the arts and culture, as well as expressing the links between the east and the west, embracing and celebrating Korean culture. No question of bringing in ideas of style, but rather of teasing out a sophisticated blend, inextricably combining commerce and culture, contemporary and craftsmanship.

Jouin Manku has put its vision of European and occidental architecture to the test by endeavouring to embrace Korean ideas, reflecting the country’s vast cultural wealth in the project. Advocating the spirit of opening up to the world in order to find our natural place in a new ecosystem.

A MAISON JARDIN

The mountain, the highest point at the intersection of sky and ground, a place of serenity, rich in endemic vegetation, unique and prodigious, charged with spirituality. A mountain crossed by forests and rivers. This relationship with nature is very powerful in Korean culture and can be seen in the omnipresence of gardens in Seoul, within palaces, private houses, temples. The nature, the forest and its enchantment are also the essence of Van Cleef & Arpels.

From this convergence, Sanjit Manku and Patrick Jouin were convinced that the garden should be one with the building.

It was not just a matter of reducing the boundary between culture and commerce, inside and outside, between house and garden, these two elements had to merge in total harmony. The vegetation invites itself into the building, it does not decorate it, it is the landscape on every floor, from the façade to the roof. The visitor wanders through the building as if on a pathway, which they follow to admire the jewels that appear to be suspended, integrated into this nature.

In order to reduce the boundary between inside and outside, to merge the building with the garden, we enlisted the help of the landscape designer Seo-Ahn Total Landscape.

YoungSun JUNG’s teams have worked on the design of many landscape and gardens in Korea and around the world. Their knowledge of the Korean environment and endemic species allowed us to recreate a typical Korean mountain nature in the heart of Seoul.

TRADITION & INNOVATION

Each project carried out by the Jouin Manku Studio is inspired by the environment in which it is installed. Here we wanted to combine tradition and modernity, an alliance made possible by the work of a specialist in celadon, the traditional Korean ceramic, which we pushed to its limits, in order to twist it under a strong heat and work carried out by a traditional workshop which usually designs ceramic tableware. Combined with cast aluminium, one of the oldest materials, of which the Koreans are experts, to offer a thin, open structure that does not enclose the shop.

To cover the walls, we used one of the most ancestral crafts of Korea, the Hanji.

While the manufacturing process is relatively similar to that of other Asian papers such as Japanese “Washi” or Chinese “Xuanzhi”, the main originality of “Hanji” lies in a key stage of its manufacture: the sieving, which determines the formation of the paper sheet. In this step, the unique movements of Korean craftsmen, which allow the plant fibers that make up Hanji to flow in all directions, produce a paper that is strong but somewhat irregular in appearance, which is one of its charms.

Thanks to the numerous characteristics with which it is endowed, Hanji has had, and still has today, a multitude of uses, from the most ordinary to the most surprising. Its longevity, of about one thousand years against two hundred years for our European paper, and its exceptional solidity, which was worth to him to enter the composition of parts of armor are not its only assets. Filtering the light, which it sifts, and letting the air circulate, the “paper that breathes” was for a long time a central element of the Korean interior.

Van Cleef & Arpels
La Maison Séoul
441, Apgujeong-ro, Gangnam-gu Séoul, Corée du Sud
www.vancleefarpels.com

Architectural concept, interior architecture, design: Studio Jouin Manku

Patrick Jouin, Sanjit Manku Jacques Goubin, Yann Brossier, Olivier Evrard, Dorien Peters, Julien Lizé - Paris, France

www.jouinmanku.com

Executive architect:
DPJ & Partners - David Pierre Jalicon - Séoul, Corée du Sud

Lighting Designer:
Voyons Voir - Stéphane Carratero - Paris, France

Landscape designer:
STL - Seo-Ahn Total landscape - YoungSun JUNG - Soojeong KIM - Séoul, Corée du Sud

Craftsmen/Companies:
JLCOM (general architectural contractor)
JOIN (general interior design company)
JLCOM (facade, with celadon ceramic by Maison Objet)

JOIN (stair)

Furniture:

Studio Jouin Manku (bespoke design)
Studio Patrick Jouin iD (« Ester » collection for Pedrali / « Manda » and« Vendôme » collection for Starset).

Visuals:
Sketch © Studio Jouin Manku
Perspectives © Studio Jouin Manku
Photographs © Yongjoon Choi