The project transforms a single-family house built in 1976 and occupied by the same owner for nearly fifty years. Located in Mangwon-dong, Seoul, where ageing residential streets continue to evolve alongside a growing creative community, the house had accumulated decades of everyday life within its structure and rooms. Rather than beginning with a blank slate, the renovation builds upon these existing conditions. Guided by the idea of 'The Old Future', the project explores how architecture can move forward through continuity rather than replacement.
The original house is treated as the foundation of the project rather than something to be erased. Existing walls, structural traces, ceiling heights, and proportions are preserved wherever possible, while new materials are introduced as another layer. Instead of merging old and new into a single language, the intervention allows each to remain legible, creating a dialogue between different moments in time.
An existing tree on the site was preserved and incorporated into the entrance sequence, becoming a natural marker of arrival while reinforcing the project's respect for what was already there.
Before its transformation, the house carried the rhythms of domestic life. Rather than erasing those memories, the renovation redirects them. Spaces once defined by private living are re-imagined for making, exhibiting, and working together, allowing the building to take on a new purpose while retaining its spatial memory.
Vaxine approaches jewelry as wearable artifacts shaped by 'The Old Future', drawing on retro-futurism, sculptural thinking, and speculative narratives. Graey 13 extends that identity into spatial language, creating a space where the brand can be experienced beyond the objects themselves. Conceived as a sequence of spatial installations rather than a conventional retail interior, the showroom presents jewellery, furniture, and architecture as a single composition. References to science fiction emerge subtly through materiality, lighting, and proportion, expressing the dialogue between memory and imagination that defines the brand.
The program is organised with clarity. The showroom occupies one side of the building while the office sits on the other, allowing exhibition and production to operate harmoniously. Distributed across the basement, ground floor, mezzanine, and upper levels, the experience unfolds gradually, with circulation revealing the building's layered history.
One of the most significant interventions takes place above. The original tiled roof has been reinterpreted as an accessible terrace, creating a new place to inhabit without altering its familiar form. Rather than expanding outward, the project discovers new possibilities within the existing building.
Throughout Graey 13, architecture is understood not as a finished object but as something shaped over time. By extending Vaxine's design language into architecture, the project treats space itself as an artefact that continues to evolve while carrying the traces of where it began.
In this sense, 'The Old Future' is less about nostalgia than the possibility of building the future from what already exists. Rather than contributing another new object to the city, the project works with what already exists. By preserving the accumulated memory of the old city and reinterpreting it through new spatial experiences, it suggests that cities can continue to evolve through careful transformation rather than replacement.