Found Founded Headquarters

Found Founded works across scales and disciplines — product and furniture design, spatial design, graphics and digital experiences — and its new headquarters is conceived less as a finished image than as a container for that range: an environment in which the studio's people, work and the things they make can accumulate over time. Order Matter designed the building as a flagship showroom and office, extending the commission to bespoke furniture and custom lighting elements, on a site in Seogyo-dong that sits one layer removed from the district's busy commercial streets.

The surrounding neighbourhood is low-rise and residential: multi-family houses and older homes alongside external staircases and incremental extensions, a familiar Seoul landscape in which traces of different periods coexist. Within it the building takes its place as a simple, solid volume, sitting among the overlapping elements around it while holding a presence of its own through the clarity of its form and material — an attitude the studio relates back to the work of Found Founded itself. It opens to the city only where necessary. Rather than extending views in every direction, openings are positioned where light and particular views are welcomed, while voids and gardens establish more measured relationships with the outside, so that the complexity of the city recedes once inside and is replaced by light and planting at close proximity.

The approach is organised around two elements of the same concrete structure: a circular column carrying the building, and the entrance beyond it. Both are chipped, their roughened surfaces set against the smooth concrete around them, so that the eye moves from column to entrance and each reads at once as part of the whole and as an element in its own right. The rough surface also indicates where to enter, and works as a surface that receives light — sunlight falling through the void above casts shadows of varying depth across its texture through the day, while the planting alongside changes with the seasons.

Beyond the entrance the ground floor opens into a communal space set one level below ground, conceived much like the living room of a house and used for informal gatherings, everyday conversation and rest as much as for meetings and events. From the lowered floor the garden planting is seen from below, putting nearby greenery rather than the surrounding city in view, and stepped seating rises towards the rear until it meets the back garden again at ground level. Movement upwards follows light coming down: a skylight sits over the central stairwell and the staircase is left as exposed concrete rather than wrapped in a further finish, so that daylight reaches through the building, guides the way up and connects the floors in a continuous vertical sequence, changing the appearance of stair and concrete as it shifts through the day.

The second and third floors share a single spatial order — an open workspace and one separate room, a model-making room below and a meeting room above — with differences in the direction of light and in the views their openings frame giving each floor its own atmosphere. In the workspaces the exposed concrete of the communal areas gives way to solid timber flooring and white-painted walls, the material character growing gentler as the building moves from shared spaces towards the places of everyday work, and the warmth of the timber softening daylight as it spreads across walls and ceilings. For a design studio daylight matters not only to the atmosphere of a space but to seeing materials and colours accurately, so orientation and openings were arranged to let light and air pass through the interior: windows on the north and south sides of the workspaces bring light from different directions and open to create a path for cross-ventilation, openings towards the external void admit softer indirect light, and windows on different floors are positioned so that they do not directly face one another. Everyday comfort is meant to come from these basic considerations — orientation, openings, daylight and air — rather than from strategies added on top.

Following the light upwards, the stair reaches a roof garden, modest in size but loosely divided by structure and planting into areas that stay connected while allowing someone to step aside within the same place. Here the city, encountered only in fragments from inside, opens up again as the roofs and houses of Seogyo-dong. The slender rooftop railing follows the rectilinear form of the building before curving gently around its corners, disappearing among the planting in places and rising above the concrete wall elsewhere to read from the street as a single line — a deliberate looseness within an otherwise ordered frame, and a measure of the building's larger intention: to hold Found Founded as it is today while remaining a calm, solid centre that the accumulation of planting, objects and work will slowly change.