The Hyundai Seoul (더현대 서울) is the department store in Yeouido that people visit without intending to buy anything. It opened in 2021 with a decision almost no retailer makes: roughly half of its selling floor was given over to indoor gardens and places to sit. The result is a 3,300 square meter indoor garden on the fifth floor, a 12-meter indoor waterfall, and a basement level that has become the single busiest pop-up floor in Korea.

I have been going back since the week it opened, in 2021, and the photos in this guide span five years. It is a useful way to see the building, because what looked like an expensive gamble in 2021 is now the fastest-growing department store in Korean retail history.

This guide starts with the practical part, how to get there, what it costs and when to go, then goes floor by floor. Prices are in Korean won. As a rough anchor, 10,000 won is about US$7, though the rate moves.

How to get to The Hyundai Seoul

The subway is the better choice, especially at weekends, and one route gets you inside without going outdoors at all.

Yeouido Station (여의도역, Lines 5 and 9), near Exit 3: follow the underground moving walkway for about 500 meters and it connects directly to the B2 entrance. Use this one in rain, snow or summer heat.
Yeouido Station, Exit 4: come up to street level and walk about 400 meters straight ahead to the main entrance.
Yeouinaru Station (여의나루역, Line 5), Exit 1: head towards Seoul Apartment, turn right at Gongjak Apartment and continue a short way to the rear entrance.

By bus, get off at the stop named The Hyundai Seoul (더현대서울, stop ID 19-282), which comes out at the main entrance. Routes 88, 360, 662, 6623 and 6628 stop there.

One more route worth knowing: IFC Mall is connected indoors. You can walk between the two without going outside, which matters in a downpour, in August, or with a stroller and a sleeping child. Some people park at IFC and walk across rather than pay The Hyundai Seoul’s rates.

Opening hours and when to go

Monday to Thursday: 10:30 to 20:00.
Friday to Sunday: 10:30 to 20:30.
Restaurant floor (6F): 10:30 to 22:00.
Closing days change from month to month, so check the official site before a special trip.

Weekday mornings are the easy time. At weekends the car park queues at the entrance, the restaurants run long waits, and the fifth floor fills up. If your plan is photographs and a quiet hour in the garden, come on a weekday before lunch.

Sounds Forest: the one thing to see

If you only look at one floor, make it the fifth. Sounds Forest (사운즈 포레스트) is an indoor garden of about 3,300 square meters (1,000 pyeong in Korean measure) under a glass ceiling that sits more than 20 meters overhead. Once you are inside, it stops feeling like you are indoors.

Putting a garden on the top retail floor is the clearest statement of what this building is trying to be. In most department stores the upper levels are restaurants or event halls, because that is where floor space has to earn the most. Here it is simply a garden: real trees, benches, people sitting for an hour. Nothing is asking you to buy anything.

Cafes and food counters ring the garden, so you can pick up a drink and take it to a bench. The weather outside stops mattering, which is the real argument for this floor. In the depths of a Seoul summer or a January cold snap, it is the same temperature in here and the light still comes through the roof.

Sounds Forest at a glance
Size: about 3,300 square meters (1,000 pyeong)
Glass ceiling: more than 20 meters high
Same floor: Petit Planet (kids and baby), electronics, food and drink, baby lounge, stroller rental
Epic Seoul: a 730 square meter pop-up and seating space right beside the garden
No admission charge, open to anyone during store hours

Epic Seoul opened in March 2024. Half of its 730 square meters is simply seating, and the other half runs pop-ups. The store added more places to sit, not fewer.

The fifth floor is also where the character and toy shops are: a LEGO store, a Disney Store and Play in the Box, which carries Pokemon, Sanrio and similar lines along with gacha machines. Pop Mart is downstairs on B2. If you are shopping for children, or for yourself, this floor and B2 are the two to plan time for. Shop lineups change, so treat this as a starting point rather than a fixed list.

Here is the same garden in 2021, a few days after the store opened. Set it beside the photo above and the trees tell you how five years went.

The garden is also not a fixed thing. It changes completely with the season.

On a return visit in autumn 2021 a luxury house had built a pop-up in the middle of the garden. That was when the logic clicked: the garden is not only a rest area, it is a stage. What gets installed there changes the whole floor.

What Sounds Forest looks like at Christmas

The most dramatic version is the Christmas one. On a December visit the entire garden had been turned into a circus village.

The 2024 theme was called Le Grand Theatre (움직이는 대극장), a European storybook circus dropped into the fifth-floor garden. Six hot air balloon models floated above it, each 7 meters tall and 5 meters across, filled with helium so they really do hang in the air. They are far bigger up close than photographs suggest.

On the ground were striped circus tents: eleven theaters in all, including a magic theater, an acrobatics theater and a music theater, with a 360-degree rotating Christmas tree 8 meters high at the center and around 10,000 lights through the whole village.

Le Grand Theatre, Christmas 2024
Location: 5F Sounds Forest
Ran from 1 November to 31 December 2024
Six helium hot air balloon models, 7 m tall and 5 m wide
Eleven circus theaters, plus an 8 m rotating Christmas tree
About 10,000 lights, and 15 characters across 15 stores

The crowds are the part to plan around. For the previous year’s Christmas village, H Village, the online booking window drew about 20,000 people at once and sold out within an hour, and the on-site waiting list ran past number 800. Weekday attendance was around 5,000 and weekends around 10,000.

Christmas 2026: Christmas in New York City

The 2026 theme is Christmas in New York City. Hyundai is rebuilding 1980s and 1990s New York inside the fifth-floor garden as H Village: thirteen red-brick buildings up to 10 meters tall, with billboards, neon signs and yellow taxis, plus two characters, a baby bear named Harry and a set of New York cats.

If you are coming from abroad, this part matters. H Village runs on advance booking, and the main booking route is a Korean app. Hyundai has set up two paths that do not require a Korean phone number:

• Book ahead through Klook. The Christmas Village admission ticket is free to reserve, needs no Korean phone number, and lets you skip the general queue.
• Or use the foreigner waiting desk on site. There is a separate desk for visitors from abroad. Korean walk-ins join by scanning a QR code on floors 2 to 4.

The equivalent village in an earlier year sold out within an hour of booking opening, and the on-site waiting list ran past number 800. If the Christmas village is the reason you are coming, plan around the booking date rather than turning up and hoping.

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And in summer

Christmas is not the only time the installation changes. On a summer visit, oversized character balloons were floating above the garden instead. Same space, completely different room.

It is worth checking what is running before you go.

The Waterfall Garden and the atrium

On the ground floor, the Waterfall Garden (워터폴 가든) drops water about 12 meters from the third floor down to the first. You see it as soon as you come through the main entrance.

The atrium is the other thing worth looking at, and arguably the better one. The building is open from the ground floor to the roof, and the floor edges curve rather than run straight, so from any balcony you can see several levels at once.

There is almost no straight line in the place. The floors are offset from each other, so looking up you get bands of white curving past one another rather than a stack of rectangles.

Each level carries water basins and planting, so looking down from a balcony you see garden before you see shops. This is what “half the selling floor” actually looks like in practice.

Look up through the glass roof and the red steel beams appear again, the same structure you see on the outside of the building. It is the detail that stops all that white curving concrete from looking plain.

Creative Ground on B2: Korea’s busiest pop-up floor

If Sounds Forest is the face, the second basement level is the engine. Creative Ground (크리에이티브 그라운드) is given over to street brands, young fashion labels and pop-up stores, and it is the reason Korean media call this building the country’s pop-up capital.

The store ran 321 pop-up stores in its first two years, and the cumulative count reached 335 by the end of March 2023. Added together those pop-ups ran for 6,239 days and drew close to 4.6 million visitors. Creative Ground ranked first among all the store’s zones on both brand count and visitor count.

What makes it unusual is which way round it works. Labels such as Matin Kim and SIE opened their first ever department store shops here, rather than the store recruiting them. This is the floor to know if you want Korean labels you cannot buy at home:

Matin Kim (마뗑킴), one of the biggest Korean womenswear and streetwear names of the past few years, logo pieces and outerwear.
thisisneverthat (디스이즈네버댓), one of the longest-running Seoul streetwear labels, graphic and workwear pieces.
MSCHF (미스치프), a Korean streetwear label, not the Brooklyn art collective of the same name.
Depound (드파운드), minimal bags and accessories with a strong following in Korea.
COOR (쿠어), quiet, well-cut menswear.
Also on the floor: SETTER and SIE (시에).

On top of the permanent shops, character, streetwear and K-pop idol pop-ups rotate through on roughly two-week cycles, so the floor is different every time you visit.

The Hyundai Seoul floor guide

Each floor has a name as well as a number, and the names are what you will see on the signs. This is the directory as it appears in the lifts.

6F Dining & Art: restaurant floor, CH 1985 culture center, ALT.1 exhibition hall, Eataly, Service Lounge, Cafe H.
5F Sounds Forest: the indoor garden, Petit Planet (kids and baby), electronics, food and drink, Epic Seoul, LEGO, Disney Store, baby lounge, stroller rental.
4F Life & Balance: golf, sports, outdoor, urban leisure, tableware, home decor, furniture, bedding.
3F About Fashion: women’s and men’s fashion, shoes, bags, jewelry, lingerie, hair salon, clothing repair.
2F Modern Mood: men’s luxury, global fashion, watches, premium repair shop, dermatology clinic.
1F Exclusive Label: luxury, jewelry, cosmetics, the Waterfall Garden, concierge, stroller rental, luggage keeping.
B1 Tasty Seoul: food hall, market, Food Truck Piazza, Wine Works, pop-up zone, customer service, nursing room.
B2 Creative Ground: street brands, young fashion, pop-up stores, Pop Mart.
B3 and below: parking.

Large installations and vehicle displays turn up on the shopping floors too, not only in the atrium.

Eating at The Hyundai Seoul

Food sits on two floors and they work differently, so it helps to know which one you want before you move.

B1, Tasty Seoul, is the food hall and counters. You order at a counter, take a buzzer, collect your food and then sit wherever you like, either in the shared Food Truck Piazza seating or at the stall’s own tables. Water is self-serve. Five Guys and Bittles Taco are both down here, alongside a long Japanese row and a Korean row, plus a bakery line and a wine shop. Budget roughly 13,000 to 16,000 won for a burger or a taco set, about US$9 to US$11.

6F is the sit-down restaurant floor and stays open until 22:00, later than the shops, with last orders around 21:00. This is where Eataly (이탈리) is, not in the basement. It is a shop and a restaurant in one: cafe on the left of the entrance, restaurant on the right, with a grocery and wine section attached. The gelato counter is the easiest stop if you just want to sit down for twenty minutes.

The rest of 6F is a proper restaurant floor rather than a food court: Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Italian kitchens with table service.

Plan around the wait. Even at weekday lunch, an hour is normal at the busier restaurants. At weekends the longest queues run to two hours. You can join the queue through an app instead of standing there, but it does not make the wait any shorter. If you do not want to spend an afternoon waiting, go up before the lunch rush, or eat at the B1 counters instead, where you order at the till and sit straight down.

Parking rates and free parking

Parking is underground and it is not cheap once the free window closes, so it is worth knowing the thresholds before you arrive.

First 30 minutes free, then 2,000 won (about US$1.40) per 10 minutes.
Spend 50,000 won (about US$35): 1 hour free.
Spend 100,000 won (about US$70): 2 hours free.
Spend 150,000 won (about US$105): 3 hours free.
CH 1985 class attendees: 2 hours free.
Holders of an ALT.1 exhibition ticket: 2 hours free.

To put that in money: park for two hours and buy nothing and you pay 18,000 won, about US$13. One thing to watch, the Starbucks on B2 does not validate parking. The exhibition ticket route is the useful one, since an ALT.1 ticket plus a meal on the sixth floor covers most of an afternoon. Parking inquiries go to 02-3277-0077.

If you are staying a while and not shopping much, Yeouido Hangang Park (여의도한강공원) has public car parks nearby: 2,000 won for the first 30 minutes, then 300 won per 10 minutes, capped at 15,000 won (about US$11) for the day, open 06:00 to 24:00. For a long visit that is a fraction of the department store rate.

At weekends and on public holidays the store car park backs up at the entrance, and two nearby office buildings are used as overflow parking: the Hyundai Motor Securities Building (현대차증권빌딩) and Yeouido Finance Tower (여의도파이낸스타워), both about a ten-minute walk away. Validation for those is done at the gift desk on B1, 10:30 to 20:30. Whether they are open varies by day, so check when you arrive. All of which is the other argument for taking the subway.

Services for visitors from abroad

Tax refund: 6F Service Lounge, with staff who speak foreign languages, for immediate refunds on purchases made in the store.
Luggage keeping: 1F Tourist Desk, aimed at travelers passing through with suitcases.
Coin lockers: B1, B3 and B4.
Stroller rental: 1F Tourist Desk and 5F, for children under 36 months and 15 kg.
Nursing rooms: B1, 5F and 6F. A fuller baby lounge with changing tables and high chairs is on 5F.
Currency exchange: WOWPASS kiosk on B2.
Concierge: 1F.
Nationwide delivery: 1F Tourist Desk, so you can send shopping bags or a suitcase on rather than carrying them.

The combination of luggage storage and nationwide delivery makes this an unusually practical stop on a travel day. You can leave a suitcase, shop, and have the shopping sent ahead.

Why the building looks like this

The store sits inside Parc1, and you can pick it out from anywhere on the island because its red columns are mounted on the outside of the building. That is the point: structure and services on the outside, so the inside can be left open. Parc1 carries the architectural signature of the late British architect Sir Richard Rogers, who built his career on exactly that idea.

At night it reads as a completely different building, with the red structure lit from below.

Yeouido (여의도) is the island district on the Han River that holds the National Assembly, the main broadcasters and most of Korea’s financial sector. For most of its life it has been a place people commute to and leave. The Hyundai Seoul changed that on weekends, and the spring flower festival and the riverside park do the rest.

It opened on 26 February 2021. Korean department stores are typically sealed boxes with no windows, on the theory that daylight and clocks remind shoppers to leave. The Hyundai Seoul did the opposite. Of a total selling area of about 89,100 square meters, roughly half was turned into indoor landscaping and customer rest space, and the ceiling was designed to let daylight in. That is an expensive decision. Floor space in a department store converts directly into sales, and halving it looks like halving the business.

I first went on 1 March 2021, four days after the doors opened. Korea was still deep in the pandemic and everyone was masked, and it was packed anyway.

The queue outside Eataly ran the length of the aisle. In that first week everything had a line.

The water basins and trees set into the middle of the atrium have been there from the start, and so have the curved floor edges. The building has barely changed. What changed is how busy it is, and what Koreans now expect a department store to be.

The answer came in the numbers. The store passed one trillion won in annual sales 33 months after opening, which is 2 years and 9 months, the fastest in Korean department store history by a margin of 2 years and 2 months over the previous record. The figure was 1.0041 trillion won, counted from 1 January to 2 December 2023, against 950.9 billion won the year before.

The customer mix explains it. Shoppers in their twenties and thirties accounted for 58 percent of sales, against an average of 25 percent at the company’s other stores. By headcount, visitors aged 30 and under made up 65 percent. Sales to foreign customers grew 891.7 percent over January to November 2023, well ahead of the 305.2 percent average across the chain, and 72.8 percent of those foreign buyers were in their twenties and thirties.

Around the area

Yeouido Park (여의도공원) is a short walk away and makes a good change of pace after a few hours indoors. Keep going towards Yeouinaru Station and you reach Hangang Park on the river, which is where Seoul goes on a warm evening.

Quick facts

Address: 108 Yeouidae-ro, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul (Parc1) / 서울 영등포구 여의대로 108
Phone: 1588-3650
Opened: 26 February 2021
Hours: 10:30 to 20:00 Mon to Thu, 10:30 to 20:30 Fri to Sun, restaurants to 22:00
Nearest subway: Yeouido Station (Lines 5 and 9), underground link from near Exit 3
Parking: first 30 minutes free, then 2,000 won per 10 minutes
Tax refund: 6F Service Lounge
Food: B1 counters and food hall, 6F sit-down restaurants and Eataly
Restaurant waits: about an hour on a weekday lunchtime, up to two hours at weekends
Best for: a rainy or very hot day, Korean street fashion labels, pop-ups, a meal with no booking, traveling with small children

Frequently asked questions

Is The Hyundai Seoul worth visiting if I am not shopping?
Yes, and that is how most people use it. The fifth-floor garden, the atrium and the ground-floor waterfall are free to walk through, and the pop-up floor changes every couple of weeks.

How do I get there from Yeouido Station without going outside?
Use the underground moving walkway near Exit 3 and walk about 500 meters. It connects straight to the B2 entrance.

Can I walk to IFC Mall without going outside?
Yes. The two are connected indoors, which is useful in bad weather or with a stroller.

Which floor is Sounds Forest on?
The fifth floor. It is an indoor garden of about 3,300 square meters under a glass ceiling more than 20 meters high.

Does Sounds Forest cost anything to enter?
No. Anyone can go up and sit there during store hours. Seasonal theme builds such as the Christmas village can need a booking or involve a queue.

Where is the Waterfall Garden?
On the first floor, visible from the main entrance. The water falls about 12 meters from the third floor.

Where are the pop-up stores?
Mainly on B2, Creative Ground. There is also a pop-up zone on B1 and Epic Seoul on the fifth floor.

How long is the wait for the restaurants?
About an hour at the busier places even on a weekday lunchtime, and up to two hours at weekends. You can join the queue through an app rather than standing in line, but the wait itself is the same. The B1 counters are the fast alternative.

Is Eataly in the basement?
No, it is on the sixth floor. The cafe is to the left of the entrance and the restaurant to the right, with a grocery and wine section attached. It runs 10:30 to 22:00, last orders around 21:00.

Can I claim a tax refund here?
Yes. The desk is in the Service Lounge on the sixth floor and handles immediate refunds on purchases made in the store, with foreign-language staff.

Can I leave my suitcase while I shop?
Yes. The Tourist Desk on the first floor takes luggage, and there are coin lockers on B1, B3 and B4.

Is it good with a baby or toddler?
It is one of the easier large stores in Seoul for it. Strollers are available on the first and fifth floors, there is a baby lounge on the fifth floor with changing tables and high chairs, and nursing rooms on B1, 5F and 6F.

Is it worth visiting at Christmas?
The fifth-floor garden is rebuilt as a themed village. In 2024 it was a circus with six seven-meter hot air balloons overhead. The theme changes yearly and bookings are sometimes needed, so check the announcement in early November.

When is the best time to visit?
Weekday mornings. The Christmas installation is the most photogenic season but also the most crowded.

The bottom line

The Hyundai Seoul works because it stopped behaving like a department store. Half the floor given to trees and seats, daylight through the roof, and a basement handed over to labels that had never been inside a department store before. That is why a building full of shops ended up on tourist itineraries, and why it took less than three years to do what took every other Korean department store at least five.

Going back across five years, the building itself has hardly changed. The trees are taller, the pop-ups are different, and the crowds are heavier. Go for the fifth floor, stay for whatever is running on B2, and eat on the sixth or in the basement. If it is raining, this is one of the best indoor afternoons in Seoul.

New to Seoul? Start with our First Time in Seoul guide: the airport, the subway, what to see and what to eat, on one page.

Written by WY, a Seoul-based local sharing honest, first-hand guides to Korea. Every guide here is a place I’ve actually been to, written from my own visits, my own photos. More about me →