Waterfall Garden, The Hyundai Seoul, Yeouido. Photo: Yongjoon Choi / courtesy Burdifilek.
You hear the water before you see a bag.
At 108 Yeoui-daero in Yeouido, the ground-floor atrium of The Hyundai Seoul opens on Burdifilek’s Waterfall Garden: white biomorphic islands, trees planted on stilts, and a sculptural cascade of about twelve metres that falls from the third floor to the first. The store opened on 26 February 2021 inside the Parc.1 mixed-use shell by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners with Korean partners, a red-framed office-and-retail pile that leaves tall voids for light. Toronto studio Burdifilek (Diego Burdi and Paul Filek) took the atrium plus selected areas on floors 2–4, roughly 9,552 square metres of a department store often cited near 89,100 square metres. Lighting designer Marcel Dion sharpened the white volumes; photographer Yongjoon Choi fixed the press images most of us still recognize. Cultural authority here arrives as sound and scale before any boutique label.
“Hyundai’s vision was to allocate 50 per cent of this floor plate to create public spaces where people can socialise in a much more experiential environment than the typical mall experience has to offer… In the end, our solution was inspired by Seoul’s surrounding nature. We chose to bring the outside in and create something unexpected that plays with scale.”
Diego Burdi, co-founder and creative director, Burdifilek
Water Before Fashion
Hyundai’s Yeouido flagship was marketed as a softer retail brief. Visit Seoul still notes roughly half the property given to recreation rather than dense selling, against a Hyundai average that press materials put closer to two-thirds retail. You feel that ratio in the void. The waterfall is not a lobby fountain tucked behind a directory; it is the room. Seating extends from the fluid forms so you can sit inside the sculpture rather than circle it. Natural light drops through the atrium skylight onto ribbed white plaster and thin curtains of water. Fashion floors by the same studio wait upstairs with chrome, marble, and gallery pacing, but the first argument is civic: a department store that asks you to pause like a park visitor.
Do not confuse this atrium with Sounds Forest on the fifth floor, a separate indoor garden of about 3,300 square metres under a taller glass volume. Both belong to the same green-retail idea; only the Waterfall Garden manufactures the arrival beat. Read The Padang Atrium Filters the Day as a sister civic void in Singapore: another public interior that prepares you before the collection or the counter.
This is the sixth chapter of The Great Asian Room, after Tianjin’s civic atrium, Ginza’s bamboo tea grove, Kanazawa’s water mirror, Nezu’s picture-frame hall, and Singapore’s Padang veil: another interior that teaches culture by how a void behaves before the programme does.
Stand Under the Cascade
Arrive from Yeouido Station (Lines 5 and 9) via Exit 3 and the underground connector into B2, or approach at street level along Yeoui-daero. Yeouinaru Station Exit 1 is the quieter back-door option when you are already on the river side. Store hours on current Hyundai materials run Monday–Thursday 10:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and Friday–Sunday 10:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., with dining floors often later toward 10:00 p.m. Confirm on ehyundai.com before you plan a late dinner upstairs. The Waterfall Garden itself needs no ticket; it is the free public room of the building.
Spend ten quiet minutes on the ground floor before you open a map. Look up the ribbed white islands, then listen: the cascade is thin and continuous, more veil than torrent. Pair the stop with The Banquet Guide to Seoul for Yeouido versus Gangnam routing, with Packing for Frieze Seoul if September fair week is why you crossed the river, and with The Return of Quiet Luxury in Seoul if the upstairs floors are the wardrobe reason you came. Superlatives about square metres matter less than the public void that softens the mall.
How to Use the Room
Treat the atrium as a hinge, not a photo-booth queue. Early weekday mornings after opening are calmer than weekend afternoons, when the cascade becomes a backdrop for phone cameras. If you need greenery at park scale, ride up to Sounds Forest later; if you need fashion, climb into Burdifilek’s selected floors after the water has reset your pace. During Frieze Seoul week, COEX in Gangnam will own your calendar; use Yeouido as a separate half-day so the atrium does not become another corridor between appointments.
Diaspora travellers who know Seoul through Gangnam counters or Jongno palaces will recognize the move: Yeouido’s office island given a room that behaves like landscape. Stay until the waterfall stops competing with the escalators in your ear. Then shop, eat, or leave, knowing the store already manufactured its authority in white plaster, living trees, and twelve metres of falling water.
