Goblin | Unhyeongung Yanggwan — The White House on a Prince's Ground

The white Western house sits on ground that once belonged to a prince-regent.

In Goblin it is the exterior of Kim Shin's home, the place he shares with a grim reaper who keeps the kitchen and a housekeeper who keeps the living. The building is Unhyeongung Yanggwan, finished in 1912 as a reception hall in the French Renaissance manner, now part of Duksung Women's University's lifelong-education campus at 464 Samil-daero.

Visitors do not walk the interior as a set. They stand in the public courtyard of Unhyeongung next door, a free royal residence that Seoul restored in the 1990s, and look across at the pale facade the cameras used. The palace itself is Joseon timber and stone. The house in the drama is plaster and a different century. The cut between them is the whole point of the series: an immortal living in a city that kept changing the style of its walls.

Anguk Station, exit 4, puts you a short walk from both gates. The palace closes on Mondays. The university building is a working school. Photograph the exterior from the street and the square. Do not treat a classroom wing as a theme park.

The scene works because the house already looked like it had outlived its first owner. A goblin can rent that kind of building. A tourist can stand on the gravel and see why.

Photo: Tristan Surtel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons