“I was brought up in Seoul and the house was magnificent. Donamjang was built by the last lineage of the Joseon dynasty in Chinese oak, using the construction and design principles of royal palace buildings,” says Kim Sung-joo. The South Korean entrepreneur is speaking of the home where she is being photographed for HTSI with bags and dolls made by her brand, MCM Worldwide. “For a short time it was home to the first president of South Korea,” she continues of the house, which now belongs to her brother. “We slept on an Ibuzari [futon] on the floor, and were surrounded by really nice old paintings and screens.”
Kim was born in 1956, and her father, Kim Soo-keun, an energy magnate, moved the family from the city of Daegu to the capital when she was just three. There, she was raised with three brothers and two sisters against a backdrop of political and economic transformation. But the owner of the Sungjoo Group and MCM Worldwide, the global luxury leather-goods and lifestyle brand, is not nostalgic about the past. The petite, fresh-faced 68-year-old – who cuts a sharp figure in a trouser suit, with cropped hair – is an advocate for modern South Korea. “We are witnessing the emergence of an Asian renaissance. K-pop, K-beauty… Young people are excited about it, and not just in the east,” she says of the country’s emergence on the world stage.
Kim is a product of Seoul’s ethos of ppalli-...
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