Rethinking privacy through semi-private spaces: focused on six residential projects in South Korea

In Korea, the nLDK (number of rooms plus Living, Dining, and Kitchen) layout dominates residential design, maximising efficiency and privacy while eliminating mediating spaces for social encounters. This study critically examines this tendency and explores alternatives through six residential projects by the architectural firm Mundoehoje. These projects challenge conventional boundaries between public and private realms by incorporating semi-private spaces that encourage informal interaction between homeowners and guests. Drawing on interviews, drawings, and fieldwork, the research highlights strategies that reconfigure the domestic threshold. The architect expands the entrance and integrates it with programmes such as the kitchen, dining, living room, and study. By finishing the entrance floor with tile or stone, visitors can enter without removing their shoes, thereby lowering the psychological barrier to casual encounters. These interventions draw upon embodied cultural practices embedded in Korean daily life, particularly sensitivities concerning floors and shoes. The findings demonstrate that such semi-private entrances enable dwellings to recover their social role as mediators of encounters with others, rather than serving solely as private realm. At the same time, they offer an opportunity to reconsider the very nature of dwelling in dense urban conditions, where the concept of privacy has too often been overemphasised.