Sweet Home|Chungjeong Apartment — The Oldest Block That Taught Green Home How to Age

Director Lee Eung-bok walked this sidewalk before a single monster was designed. Chungjeong Apartment at 30 Chungjeong-ro, Seodaemun-gu, went up in 1937 as a five-storey concrete block for a Japanese landlord named Toyoda Taneo. After Liberation it was a hotel, a wartime courtroom, a UN billet, then a bank-owned walk-up sold to ordinary Seoulites. Forty-one households still live behind those stained corridors.

Lee told interviewers he needed a building that was not expensive and that already felt marked for erasure. The webtoon's Green Home is a set. This is the brick that taught the set how to look tired. The 2020 Netflix series borrowed the massing, the fire-escape logic, the sense that the city had already decided the place was finished.

Stand on Chungjeong-ro after you leave Exit 9 of Chungjeongno Station. Do not go inside. Residents asked for that years ago, when fans started treating their stairwells as a theme park. From the curb the building is short, grey, and stubborn. A 2024 photograph on Wikimedia still shows the same stubbornness. Redevelopment dates keep sliding. The concrete has outlasted the first wave of Sweet Home tourism. That is the scene the camera was chasing: a house that refuses to leave the street.