[News Culture] Two sisters in Miryang, South Gyeongsang Province, live only a few steps apart, but their houses look nothing alike. Lee Young-hee chose a Western-style home with red Spanish roof tiles, while her younger sister Lee Soon-ok built a timber house with the porches and open spaces of a modern hanok.
In Jeonbuk Special Self-Governing Province, Lee Seul-gi and Baek Seo-hee share a very different kind of home. The two friends renovated a 1980s house with two front gates, keeping enough separation inside for each to live at her own pace.
EBS1’s “Our Sweet Homes,” airing Nov. 3, visits both homes and the people who have learned how to stay close without doing everything the same way.
Two sisters, two very different houses
Young-hee moved to the countryside seven years ago after her health declined. The land belonged to Soon-ok, who had bought it 15 years earlier, but Young-hee paid her sister the full value for the portion she used. Soon-ok, in turn, gave her the spot with the better view.
Young-hee’s husband, who works as a formwork carpenter, built the house himself. Red roof tiles give it a European look, while the bedroom is finished in hinoki cypress and the floor in ocher-colored stone. Outside sits a wood-fired stove where the family once cooked chicken soup in a large cauldron, though the pot now sits rusting because it proved difficult to maintain.
A drum kit in the ocher room points to another side of Young-hee’s country life. She picked up several hobbies while recovering her health, including drumming. Soon-ok prefers the haegeum, and the sisters’ different tastes are just as clear inside their homes as they are in the instruments they play.
Soon-ok’s house grew out of memories of the traditional homes she knew as a child. She still remembers sitting on a wooden porch while her father cleaned her ears, and she wanted several kinds of maru built into her own house. A narrow porch opens directly from the bedroom, another runs in front of the ocher room, and a raised numaru beside the living room gives her a place to drink tea and play the haegeum while looking outside.
She also added an indoor wooden platform so she could sit comfortably through the winter. Young-hee thinks it takes up too much room. Soon-ok thinks it is indispensable. Soon-ok has similar opinions about her sister’s outdoor stove and red roof tiles.
Their husbands still work in the city, so the sisters spend much of the week looking out for each other. When it is time to eat, one often heads straight over to see what the other is doing. They have separate houses and separate routines, but neither has far to go for company.
Two friends rebuild an old house around their own routines
Lee Seul-gi and Baek Seo-hee first met after Seo-hee left Seoul to start a business and Seul-gi was working with a local startup support program.
They decided that if they were going to live outside Seoul, there was little reason to squeeze into separate studio apartments. Instead, they looked for an older house with enough room to share and found a 1980s home that had once housed three families.
Renovation began with demolition. An illegal structure in the yard had to come down, along with a glass enclosure around the main house. Once the glass was removed, they discovered it had also been keeping out much of the winter wind.
The two kept as much of the original house as they could, including wooden windows, decorative ceiling trim and an arched brick opening uncovered during construction. That choice came with a price. By skipping major insulation work, they kept more of the old structure but also accepted colder winters and hotter summers.
The interior reflects how differently the two women like to spend their time. Seo-hee enjoys having people over, so most of the first floor is set up for guests. A large platform in the bedroom can accommodate several people, while a green sofa anchors the living room.
Seul-gi is more comfortable upstairs. When the house gets crowded, she retreats to the second floor, where her bedroom and study are filled with secondhand furniture and objects she has collected herself.
She also took on much of the hands-on repair work. In the kitchen, three layers of tile had made the walls unusually thick, so she bought tools and cut them back herself. She later built a wooden fence to block the view from the neighboring house, only to come home and find that it had fallen over.
The fence is still gone. The neighbors can still see in. Neither woman seems particularly bothered by it now.
Seo-hee has also found her own way to mark a life without marriage. She once invited dozens of friends to what she called a “collection party,” joking that after years of giving wedding money to other people, it was time to get some of it back.
There was no wedding and no attempt to make the party resemble one. It was simply a celebration of the life she had already built.
The two homes in “Our Sweet Homes” have little in common architecturally. What connects them is more practical: enough room to be together, and enough room to be left alone.
“Our Sweet Homes” airs Nov. 3 at 9:55 p.m. KST on EBS1.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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