Studio Prepro Wraps a Circular Bar in Black Concrete to Anchor Seoul's Winenara Wine Hub

Wine retail in Seoul has been quietly shifting away from the transactional and toward the experiential. Studio Prepro's Winenara Seongsu Store, completed in 2023 in the Seongdong-gu district, takes that shift seriously. The 211-square-meter space on Ttukseom-ro is designed not as a bottle shop with aspirations but as a genuine social venue: part bar, part cellar, part event space, built around a bold sculptural centerpiece that signals its intentions the moment you walk in.

What makes the project worth studying is how a relatively modest retail interior achieves spatial hierarchy without walls. A circular service bar, clad in textured black concrete and crowned by a suspended disc canopy, anchors the plan and organizes every programmatic zone around it. From that nucleus, the space radiates outward toward tasting areas, glazed storefronts, personal wine lockers, and a deeper cellar. The material palette of wood, concrete, and fabric stays restrained enough to let the bottles themselves do the visual heavy lifting.

The Circular Bar as Spatial Engine

The circular bar is not just a service counter; it is the organizational logic of the entire plan. Positioned at the heart of the store, it draws visitors inward from the entrance and distributes them to different zones depending on their intent: casual browsing, seated tasting, or a deeper dive into the cellar beyond. The suspended disc element floating above the bar creates an implied ceiling plane that distinguishes this social zone from the taller, more open retail perimeter.

Textured black concrete gives the bar a gravity that lightweight retail fixtures rarely achieve. Combined with backlit bottle displays along the perimeter walls, the contrast between the dark core and the luminous edges gives the room a sense of depth that belies its actual footprint. Exposed ceiling ductwork overhead keeps the atmosphere honest, avoiding the slick finish of a luxury boutique in favor of something closer to the industrial character Seongsu is known for.

Where Retail Becomes a Living Room

Two distinct seating conditions tell the story of Winenara's hybrid program. At the bar, swivel stools face an illuminated wall of wine storage, framing the act of selection as a communal event rather than a solitary errand. Along the opposite edge, a generous yellow-upholstered bench invites longer stays. Timber-framed display shelves rise behind the bench like a curated gallery wall, interspersed with a digital screen that likely supports the store's event and educational programming.

The yellow bench is a small but significant gesture. Its color breaks from the otherwise monochromatic palette of black, grey, and natural timber, marking the seating area as a zone of comfort and lingering. Paired with vertical bottle displays, it converts dead retail wall space into a backdrop for conversation. It's the kind of detail that separates a place people pass through from a place they return to.

Daylight and Greenery as Spatial Relief

The project's relationship to the street is handled through full-height glazing that floods the front of the store with natural light and frames a green courtyard beyond the entrance. In a space dominated by dark surfaces and artificial illumination for the wine displays, this daylit threshold acts as a pressure valve, preventing the interior from feeling like a bunker. Dappled sunlight plays across the concrete floor near the windows, creating a sensory contrast with the more controlled atmosphere deeper inside.

Timber bottle shelving along the window edge does double duty: it displays inventory while filtering incoming light. The shelving's warm tone softens the raw concrete at floor level and connects the store's interior to the organic textures visible outside. It is a straightforward move, but it grounds the entire entrance sequence and gives Winenara a legibility from the street that many wine shops, often hidden behind frosted glass and exclusivity, deliberately avoid.

Material Economy with Purpose

Studio Prepro's material choices, wood, fabric, and concrete, are unremarkable on paper. What matters is how they are deployed. Concrete carries the weight of the central bar and the floor plane, establishing a utilitarian base. Timber appears in the shelving and display frames, adding warmth without domesticating the space. Fabric shows up in the seating, providing tactile softness where bodies meet furniture. Special art paint by PH Woojin contributes textural nuance to surfaces that might otherwise read as flat.

There is no marble, no brass, no attempt to borrow luxury signifiers from traditional wine culture. The result is a space that feels approachable to a broader audience, which aligns precisely with Winenara's stated ambition: welcoming anyone with an interest in wine, regardless of expertise or age. The architecture and the brand strategy are, for once, saying the same thing.

Why This Project Matters

Winenara Seongsu is a case study in how a single spatial decision, placing a circular bar at the center of a retail plan, can reorganize an entire program. By making the social moment the literal core of the store, Studio Prepro subordinates shopping to gathering. The cellar, the lockers, the tasting zones all orbit around a hub designed for eye contact and conversation. That priority is encoded in the architecture, not just the marketing.

In a city where experiential retail is often synonymous with Instagram set pieces, the Seongsu store offers something more durable. Its material restraint, its honest engagement with daylight and street life, and its refusal to gatekeep through luxury aesthetics suggest a model for specialty retail that other programs, not just wine, could learn from. Design team members Boram Seo, Dowoo Lee, Subin Kang, and Donghui Park have produced a space that earns its claim to being a cultural hub rather than merely asserting it.

Winenara Seongsu Store by Studio Prepro. Seongdong-gu, Seoul, South Korea. 211 m². Completed 2023. Photography by Donggyu Kim.

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