On the third floor of an older building in Seoul's Jung-gu, above an auto repair shop, molae designs CONCRETED, a fragrance showroom staged as a perfume with top, heart, and base notes.
CONCRETED is the first Seoul showroom for a Korean niche fragrance brand beloved in the United States, Europe and beyond, whose scents are drawn from East Asia and, specifically, from Seoul itself. molae places it on the third floor of an older building in Jung-gu, near a subway station, with a tiled facade and an auto repair shop on the ground floor. Nothing about the address reads as perfumery. That mismatch becomes the project's first gesture, what molae calls the top note: the encounter a visitor does not expect.
The brand name carries three meanings at once. Concrete as a building material. Concrete as a raw extract in perfumery, the waxy mass left after solvent extraction of flowers. And the adjective: something actual, tangible, held. molae treats those meanings as scaffolding. The showroom is structured the way a fragrance is composed, with a top note that surprises, a heart note that holds the brand's way of seeing Seoul, and a base note that settles into memory after the visitor has left.
The main floor plate is kept as found. A raw concrete slab runs overhead, its beams still carrying pour seams, rebar traces and old staining. The floor is a pale aggregate terrazzo. Fabric-covered panels, drawing on the textiles of hanbok, divide the room into a showroom and a working studio without sealing it off; light passes through and catches the grain of the cast ceiling. At the centre rises a black box tall enough to meet the slab, a monolith in a half-finished shell.
That box is the heart. Its outer skin is hanji, the traditional Korean mulberry paper, handmade and dyed with meok, the ink used in East Asian brush painting. Up close the surface holds the irregularity of hand-applied pigment rather than the flat finish of industrial lacquer. A diagonal slit cuts through one wall. Small square openings frame fragments of street through the fabric windows beyond. A metal armature holds a screen playing the brand's film. Mirrors set flush into the interior catch the products and the visitor at once.
molae leans on materials that Korean and East Asian culture has long used and that Western perfumery has mostly ignored. Hanji for the booth. Meok for its colour. Hanbok fabric for the panels. Birch stained to the tone of graphite, split into slender columns and paired with brushed metal trays, for the freestanding display towers that hold single bottles. Steel and aluminium carts in the rear studio keep the working side legible as such, casters exposed, shelves open.
Inside the booth the air slows. Light filters through the diagonal slits in walls and ceiling and lands on the scents rather than the room. Exploration here is meant to be immersive and private, a sensory pocket cut into a warehouse floor. What the visitor carries back out, in molae's framing, is the base note: Seoul as CONCRETED sees it, held as memory rather than souvenir.
