Namdo Bunsik

"The traces of time are expensive. Price them out and they are literally expensive."

Namdo Bunsik began as a small snack bar in Seochon. The Ikseon-dong store was the brand’s first flagship as it expanded into a franchise. Underbar designed every side of the brand: the typeface, logo, graphics, furniture, and the space itself.

The biggest variable was the building. A single hanok in an Ikseon-dong alley. The roof leaked under a tarp, muddy water pooled on the floor, and the walls were covered in rust stains and mold. Rebuilding from scratch would have been faster, and we did consider it, but remodeling and reconstruction fall under clearly different legal regulations. In the end we chose to repair. The only thing worth keeping was the timber skeleton of columns, beams, and rafters.

Underbar respects and loves things that carry the marks of time. Age was a material we knew how to handle. The problem was collapse. Everything had to be built new, yet it had to look old. The design began with the task of creating the traces of time from scratch. And the site was Ikseon-dong: a neighborhood where alleys of hanok, once used as cramped rented rooms, became a commercial district as they were. Here, spaces that wear time hold power. Looking brand-new was not an option.

Korean retro was at its peak at the time. But that retro was mostly an exaggerated vocabulary: saturated colors, loud old-style signs, rows of nostalgia-baiting props. Exaggerated design rarely lasts. The line between the dignity of an old establishment and plain tackiness is razor-thin. We focused on elevating that old-shop sensibility into something refined.

The tables show that judgment. The diamond pattern on the tops came from the wooden ceilings of houses built in the 1980s. We wanted them to look as if tiles had been lifted off a ceiling and set into a table, though they were plainly newly made. The ceiling exposed a new timber frame joined with the old skeleton, and the walls were toned down to cream. The chairs are stacking chairs from old wedding halls. The floor is terrazzo, the kind known locally as dokkidashi. It looks aged, but we poured fresh concrete and ground the surface down. We used the vocabulary of an old snack bar while tightening the proportions and finishes. Stopping right at the edge of tackiness was the standard.

The graphics followed the same principle. A box sign that reads like a sunrise and sunset, a logo of three round faces, and the catchphrase “Only the famed snacks of Namdo, chosen and gathered,” written in deliberately old-fashioned spelling. We drew the typeface by hand, hoping to capture the touch of the nameless sign artists who built geometric lettering long before computers. The facade used the aluminum panels once common on old shops. Few use them now, and with metal prices up, they cost more than carpentry. In Ikseon-dong, where every store carries at least one retro element, the store had to stand out without raising its voice.

Namdo Bunsik had a waiting line from day one. First-month sales passed 200 million won, and as far as we know, monthly sales stayed above 100 million for a long while. For a snack bar, those are astonishing numbers.

The traces of time are expensive. Price them out and they are literally expensive. Making the store look like an old snack bar that had simply been fixed up cost a great deal. That cost makes you realize how undervalued the beauty of freely inherited age really is. The traces of time are expensive because they are original. If a franchise could express the originality of a tteokbokki shop that survived for decades, we believed no branding could be more powerful. The plan held up, and the sales proved it.

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