from the founder
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I designed them, built them with my own hands, selected materials, met with people, and considered where every object should belong — all in order to create places where people could stay, gather, and live.
But as time passed, I realized that what remained with me was not the shape of a space itself.
It was the emotions people felt within it, and the invisible atmosphere that filled the room.
I had long been fascinated by that unseen sense of presence.
And at some point, I began to wonder:
Could the emotion of a place remain, even after the space itself was gone?
At the end of that question, I found fragrance.
From there, I began to look further back in time, toward the spaces of the Joseon royal court.
A king, too, had a day.
And within that day were many different rooms and moments.
A hall where he received the first greetings of dawn.
A place to pause and breathe.
The open air before a hunt.
An evening of celebration.
And, deep into the night, a moment when the heart was drawn toward someone.
History records where kings went and what they did.
But it rarely tells us what they felt within those spaces.
The Eighth Room began with those unrecorded emotions.
Beyond seven royal rooms lies one final room —
an eighth room that history never recorded.
For generations, we have told the stories of our royal heritage through film, drama, music, and art.
I began with that same desire.
But I wanted to express it through scent.
The emotions I once expressed through space, I now want to preserve through fragrance.
Not the authority of a king, but the rhythm of his day.
Not the crown, but the emotions beneath it.
Through each scent, I hope someone can briefly step into that day and experience those feelings for themselves.
We do not want to simply explain the beauty of Korea.
We want people to experience it through scent.
To create fragrances that remain unmistakably our own, while still resonating with people around the world.
That is why The Eighth Room began.
And that is the direction I hope to take this brand.
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from the PERFUMER
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I have designed distinctive signatures for different brands, studied the structures of the world’s most celebrated fragrances, and learned the delicate principles of balance behind them.
As a fragrance researcher, I have worked with countless raw materials and witnessed moments when a single molecule could transform an entire composition.
As a chief perfumer, I have been responsible for a fragrance from its very first idea to its final form.
And yet, most of the language of perfumery I had learned was rooted in the West.
A question stayed with me for a long time:
Where is the fragrance created through our own sensibility?
When I first met Taehwan Jang, founder of The Eighth Room, we did not begin by talking about perfume.
We spoke about space and time.
Seven royal rooms, and beyond them, an eighth room.
A world in which the air, atmosphere, and emotions shift as one moves from one space and moment to another.
It was the world of The Eighth Room.
My task was to translate that world into fragrance.
In that moment, I knew this would become one of the most meaningful journeys of my career as a perfumer.
So I did not rush.
To find the notes capable of expressing a single room, I reformulated each composition dozens of times.
I refined the progression from top notes to base notes as a curve of time — allowing the fragrance to settle slowly, like the air within a room growing still.
Often, it took longer to decide what to remove than what to add.
I continued until each room remained as one complete emotion.
A niche perfume created through Korean sensibility and shaped by the beauty of Korea.
This is how the world of The Eighth Room became fragrance.
And when you open the door to each room,
I hope the air and emotions you encounter remain in your memory for a long time.
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