Hanok
Today’s post is on a traditional Korean house you may have seen before! These houses are called 한옥 (pronounced han-ok). Depending on where the house was built, as well as the inhabitants status on the hierarchy and wealth are factors that can change how the hanok looks and was built. Richer aristocrats (양반, yang-ban) had their houses built with wood, whilst most average citizens had their house built with straw roofs instead of roof tiles. I will make a post on the straw roof houses (초가집) later on! :)
The tiled roof hanoks were built from wood and tiles on the roofs. Richer aristocrats would apply a special dye to the roofs to make them a shade of aqua blue. The walls were built with wood and rock and a mix of mud and straw was applied to keep the house more insulated and to prevent rain from coming into the house. The doors were a rectangular lattice which had paper on the inside side of the door. Probably one of the most significant features of traditional Korean houses are the heated floors! These were installed in houses of only the richest, as it was really expensive!
Here’s how the heated floors worked: The rooms would be situated around the kitchen. The kitchen had one fire where they would cook on. The heat was carried through underneath the rooms and would consequently heat up the floor! The more modern version of these houses use pipes underneath the rooms to make the heating even more efficient.
Although k-dramas make these house look SO fancy, the truth is, the rooms were around 6m squared, or for you non-metric people, 71 square feet. This is because Korean architecture didn’t use bricks due to their unavailability which made the houses really small!
