In a quiet corner of Gangneung, where mountains barely rise and the land rolls gently into anonymity, AOA Architects have crafted HOJI — a collection of houses that avoid the spectacle typical of South Korea’s vacation architecture.
Shunning the brash aesthetics of poolside villas and curated “healing stays,” HOJI takes a quieter stance. It doesn’t sell a lifestyle but invites the visitor into something more ephemeral: memory, distance, and dislocation. These aren’t rooms to photograph; they are spaces to inhabit.
HOJI captured by Danny Kai is composed of three distinct guest buildings — the Octagonal House, Long House, and Round House — along with a community warehouse and the owner’s own home. Scattered across a modest 3,300m² slope, the site resists the gravitational pull of design trends. Each form appears deliberately blunt, at ease among countryside vernacular: they might be barns, silos, or warehouses, if not for the way light bounces, disappears, or reveals their weight. There is a tension between the handmade and the austere — structures that are both playful and monkish.
AOA’s approach here is anti-iconic. The buildings flirt with archetype but never commit: the Octagonal House is a pavilion, a tent, a courtyard dwelling. The Round House is a spatial riddle, its fireplace-turned-oven-hood hovering like an art object. The Long House draws its name from its plan, but not its effect — with beams hanging like punctuation marks across a ceiling that reflects its viewers back onto themselves. Each space offers a moment of disorientation, a slippage between function and fiction.
Interiors are spare but warm — wood on every surface, irregular chairs like reassembled crates, and light that feels carefully rehearsed. At dawn, the steep ceilings glow with a monastic hush. At night, starlight and the far-off bark of a dog become part of the program. These are spaces not designed for display, but for the quiet accumulation of sensory detail: the downy warmth of sunset on bare skin in an open courtyard shower, the whisper of grasses brushing the walls.
HOJI succeeds by doing less. Its restraint is not minimalist, but conceptual — each building a framework for a slightly altered state. The use of symmetry and scale grounds the visitor, while elements like the red marble wall or the oversized ceiling object push toward the uncanny. Rather than impose an identity, AOA allows each visitor to project their own.
