Oseong Hanok Village

Character

Awon Gotaek was assembled in Oseong from a 250-year-old hanok moved from Jinju and a 150-year-old hanok from Jeongeup. The reconstruction took 15 years. The timber arrived with histories of its own, but the architecture visitors see is also the result of a long act of re-siting

At Awon, relocation remains visible as a design decision rather than being disguised as uninterrupted survival. The old timber buildings sit beside contemporary architecture, a gallery and a bamboo meditation path. Their age is real, but so is the modern composition around them: old structures were dismantled, moved across provincial boundaries and made to work inside a new architectural setting

The rest of Oseong broadens that idea from one property to a village. Around twenty hanok share the area with private homes, stays, cafés, galleries and resident-tended gardens. The result is architectural continuity carried through reuse and occupation, with historic fabric functioning inside a settlement that is still socially alive

The experience

Oseong is spatially loose. Roads and lanes pass private houses, hanok stays, cafés and galleries, with Jongnamsan and Wibong Mountain forming the larger setting. There is no single enclosed compound: the village is read through repeated shifts between domestic frontage, hospitality spaces, gardens and wooded edges

Awon is the most concentrated architectural encounter because its old and new layers are deliberately adjacent. Elsewhere the distinctions are less curated. A hanok may be a residence, accommodation or commercial space; another property may be visible from the road without being a public interior. The same roofline therefore does not imply the same kind of access

That overlap is one of Oseong's strongest visitor facts. A café terrace, guesthouse courtyard, resident garden and public lane can occupy the same visual field while belonging to different social worlds. Tourism is inserted into village life rather than replacing it

History

Oseong's present heritage landscape was assembled through arrivals. Awon gives the process its clearest physical scale: VisitKorea traces the complex to a 250-year-old hanok from Jinju and a 150-year-old hanok from Jeongeup, with reconstruction taking 15 years. Moving an old house here meant preserving timber and form through dismantling and reassembly, then placing the recovered structures beside new architecture instead of recreating a single historic-period scene

The village grew through the same broader logic of reuse, newer hanok construction and permanent residence. Wanju now describes roughly twenty traditional houses alongside stays, cafés, galleries and forest experiences, while residents continue to use the area as home rather than as a controlled heritage compound

Resident participation also became part of Oseong's public identity. Wanju's Open Garden Festival uses gardens and ecological paths tended by villagers as settings for performances and small cultural programs. The maintenance of the landscape is therefore not only a tourism service; it is work carried out by people who live inside the place being visited

A week-long BTS stay for the group's 2019 Summer Package sharply increased recognition of Awon and Oseong. The celebrity association did not create the architecture, but it changed the scale of attention. Oseong was later selected for the 2025–2026 Korea Tourism 100 list, formalizing a tourism role that had grown around an already mixed residential and cultural village

Before you go

The village itself and the businesses inside it operate on different terms. Public lanes and the general village area remain accessible, while hanok stays, Awon, cafés, galleries and other venues set their own hours and may have separate admission or reservation rules. Private residences are interwoven with visitor spaces, so the public route never represents unrestricted access to every hanok