Our Story: Why Chapters, Not Numbers
Seoul Nooks didn’t start as a coliving business plan. It began simply as a home where the founder and friends lived, occasionally hosting a couple of digital nomads. What we discovered in our first house was eye-opening. While we had a beautifully intimate community, this closeness sometimes became overwhelming. When five out of six people gathered, the remaining one often felt pressured to join, not from anyone’s expectations, but from their own desire to be part of the community. We saw wonderful members leave because this intensity wasn’t sustainable for them.
This led us to a crucial realization: Could a bigger community actually create more space for mindful choices? This question gave birth to Chapter 2, an 8-minute walk away. By spreading across houses, we found that the pressure to participate in every gathering naturally reduced, letting authentic relationships flourish at their own pace.
Chapter 3, just two minutes from Chapter 1, emerged from multiple dreams about community living. With its garden bringing nature to our doorstep and a space large enough to gather everyone around one big table for family dinners, it explores how reconnecting with nature helps us reconnect with ourselves and each other. The larger community size also allows for diverse interest groups to form naturally and lets us be more open in our membership process. When we were smaller, each new member had such a big impact that we had to be extremely careful with each application — another kind of pressure we wanted to release. It’s our laboratory of dreams — testing how a more diverse, fluid community can still maintain its warmth and connection.
Each expansion came only after a year of turning away potential members, letting our growth be guided by real needs and meaningful connections. Sometimes the most meaningful decisions aren’t the most practical ones. That’s why we call them chapters, not numbers — each space emerged from questions about sustainable community living that needed to be explored.
Today, you get access to all three houses as one community. Use any space freely, join any gathering naturally, and find your own rhythm within our larger story. It’s not a typical co-living setup because it wasn’t designed to be one. It evolved organically from real questions about how to live together meaningfully.
