Stocker Lee Architetti Designs WOOYOUNGMI’s New Monolithic Seoul Landmark

Summary

• The WOOYOUNGMI Itaewon Flagship was completed in October 2025 by Stocker Lee Architetti
• The flagship serves as the brand’s second standalone flagship after the Rue Saint-Honoré opening
• The four-story interior includes a ground-floor lounge featuring custom furniture by artist Dongwook Choi, the womenswear and menswear collections, and a rooftop garden overlooking the city

Following the 2023 debut of her prestigious Paris flagship on Rue Saint-Honoré, brand WOOYOUNGMI has returned to her roots with a second architectural masterpiece in Seoul’s Itaewon district. Designed by the Swiss-Italian practice Stocker Lee Architetti, the new MANMADE flagship is a 970-square-meter monolithic structure that translates the brand’s sophisticated tailoring into a physical, urban form.

The building is a direct response to its compact, curved plot along an inclined road. Stocker Lee Architetti utilized the site’s natural constraints as a primary design driver, creating a volume that “bends and adjusts” to the movement of the street. The exterior features a duality of surfaces: a lower mass of textured concrete cast in OSB formwork—creating a woven, textile-like grain—and an upper register wrapped in a luminous skin of glass blocks. This “glass lantern” filters natural light into the store during the day and transforms the building into a glowing beacon for Itaewon’s nightlife after dusk.

Inside, the store navigates the steep slope through a series of staggered mezzanine levels connected by a central vertical core. This “cinematic” layout creates shifting ceiling heights and varying proportions, allowing the menswear and womenswear collections to be encountered as part of a continuous journey. The material palette remains ascetic—concrete, steel, stone, and wood—ensuring the architecture withdraws enough for the garments to take center stage. By bridging the design language of its Paris predecessor with the energy of Seoul, the new flagship stands as a definitive monument to WOOYOUNGMI’s global “quiet luxury” movement.

WOOYOUNGMI Itaewon Flagship
38 Itaewon-ro 27-gil
Yongsan District
Seoul, South Korea