The ‘25th Seoul Living Design Fair,’ Korea’s largest living-trends exhibition—co-hosted by Design House and COEX and co-organized by the magazines ‘Happy House’ and ‘Luxury’—closed after a five-day run from the 3rd to the 7th, recording an all-time high of approximately 286,000 visitors.
Under the theme ‘Creating a Home Full of Happiness,’ this year’s Seoul Living Design Fair brought together a total of 366 brands (1,459 booths) leading living trends at home and abroad, showcasing the changing concept of the home and the latest living & life trends centered on the millennial generation.
In the ‘Living Trend’ section, where the latest interior trends can be seen at a glance, living brands from around the world—such as the Northern European premium furniture brand Fritz Hansen and the Spanish-style furniture brand Laura Glamour—participated and drew attention with proposals for exotic spatial styling. Global modular furniture brands such as Montana and USM, targeting the Korean market where frequent relocation and demand for customized interiors are on the rise, also stood out. In addition, brands including B. Ein Kino, Jackson Chameleon, and Villa Record demonstrated the competitiveness of domestic furniture and interior design.
At ‘Designer’s Choice,’ the highlight exhibition of the Seoul Living Design Fair, a collaborative display between the German lifestyle brand ‘MINI LIVING’ and Kim Chi-ho—one of Korea’s leading space designers and architects—proposed solutions for sharing, creation, and efficient spatial styling. Under the keywords of sharing and creation, MINI LIVING has been carrying out projects to find answers to the problems facing large cities, such as extreme density, emotional isolation, and bleak environments. As one such example, designer Kim Chi-ho reinterpreted ‘Built by All,’ which MINI LIVING presented in Milan in April of last year, through a Korean sensibility, proposing a new solution showing that even a small space can be used in a sufficiently stylish way.
In addition, the ‘Living Design Award’ was held on-site, in which a panel of judges composed of living-industry experts—including officials from design associations and interior designers—selected the products and spaces that presented the most notable designs among the participating brands. For the ‘Outstanding Space Award,’ Fritz Hansen, along with Montana, USM, Hosting House, and Nespresso Korea, were selected. The ‘Outstanding Product Award’ went to a total of 10 teams: Disney Home, Laura Glamour, Mamel, Million, Seoul Bund, So SOH, Smeg, Sico Korea, Cheongsong Baekja, and Corelle & Pyrex.
Meanwhile, at the ‘Living Trend Seminar,’ held as a concurrent event of the Seoul Living Design Fair under the theme ‘Future of Urban Living,’ eight living-trend experts from five countries—including Google’s Mickey Kim, MINI LIVING’s Oke Hauser, James Law of Hong Kong’s Cybertecture, and Hiroya Yoshizato, author of ‘Brokering Your Lifestyle’ and co-CEO of R-Fudosan—gathered to present global living talking points such as sharing, regeneration, space, and the connected home. At the seminar held on the 5th, James Law, head of Hong Kong’s Cybertecture, said that the homes of the millennial generation “must move in a direction that reflects human-centered technology to ease people’s suffering and solve the various problems that exist within cities.”
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Designer’s Choice ‘Sharing and Freedom Within the City’ / MINI LIVING + Kim Chi-ho (CEO of Chiho & Partners)
Reinterpreting the MINI LIVING exhibition ‘Built by All,’ held in Milan in April 2018, it presented a spatial aesthetic that is ‘small, wonderful, and desirable.’ It shows how the wise and beautiful daily life we should pursue in the future is possible even through the smallest of spaces. The exhibition space, surrounded by black walls, signifies the uniform and bloated architecture and daily life of urban living. Within it, a fashion designer’s hand-span-sized space, reflected repeatedly across various colors and segmented windows, symbolizes the lifestyle of creative people who aspire to a free life unbound by the size or boundaries of space.