GRANHAND. | From a Bukchon Hanok to Fragrance for Everyday Life

More than anything, we want GRANHAND to fit naturally into the lives of the people who use it.

— Kim Yeon-woo, then head of planning at GRANHAND LAB

The story that accompanies Susie Salmon begins with a fresh bouquet, a vase and a bite of apple straight from the fridge. GRANHAND. chose an afternoon at home to put the fragrance into words.

GRANHAND. began in 2014 in a small hanok, a traditional Korean house built in Seoul’s Bukchon neighborhood. Drawn to the work of the carpenters who shaped the timbers and the craftspeople who laid the tiles, Junhyuk Jeong set out to build a place for fragrance with a team of his own.

Contents

Brand at a Glance
The Founder and the Origins of GRANHAND.
How GRANHAND. Makes Fragrance
1. The Stories Behind Old Paper and Fresh Flowers
2. Fabric Labels and a Fragrance Made for a Place
References

Brand at a Glance

Founded — 2014
Founder — Junhyuk Jeong (정준혁)
Origin — Bukchon, Seoul, South Korea
Official websites — English website / Korean website

The Founder and the Origins of GRANHAND.

From the Hanok Builders of Samcheong-dong to Bukchon

While living in Samcheong-dong, Jeong often watched hanok builders at work. Carpenters shaped the wood, workers fitted the pieces together, and tilers laid the roof. Seeing how many hands it took to build a house made him want to put up a hanok himself. He already cared deeply about fragrance, and the house became a place to start a brand of his own.

The site was an overgrown lot in a Bukchon alley. Working with limited funds, the team drew up the design and found the carpenters and tilers themselves. The first shop opened in the hanok in the winter of 2014.

In the name GRANHAND., ‘GRAN’ expresses the idea of living together in harmony, while ‘HAND’ recalls the warmth Jeong found in the builders’ work. Almost every step in making the products was done by hand in the early days. The team made its own signs and display cards, and wrapped products in layers of paper in place of a box.

The Seochon Lab and Signature Perfume

When perfume was still often seen as a gift or something to wear for an occasion, GRANHAND. set out to make fragrances people could use every day. A trace of scent left on clothes or a sachet tucked into a drawer gave fragrance a place in the small routines of home and getting dressed.

By 2018, the brand had a location in Seochon, where it adapted a house to suit the neighborhood. Before opening a shop, planning lead Kim Yeon-woo and the team walked the surrounding alleys to get a feel for the streets and their buildings.

We work out what color we can bring and still blend into the neighborhood.

— Kim Yeon-woo

In Seochon, GRANHAND LAB held workshops where visitors could build a fragrance. The brand was also exploring how to bring perfume and writing together. About six years after opening, it officially released five Signature Perfumes in 2020. The earlier limited edition came with a book that paired photographs inspired by the team’s feelings and ideas about scent with five pieces of writing. It gave the stories that accompany the fragrances room to unfold on the page.

Finding a First Home Overseas

The team walked the streets of Tokyo before deciding where to open its first shop outside Korea. Over roughly three years it explored several neighborhoods for a site that would give the brand room to shape the experience itself. The shop opened in Nakameguro in October 2026. LTH STUDIO, which had worked with GRANHAND. in Seoul, designed the space around the existing building and its surroundings.

How GRANHAND. Makes Fragrance

The Stories Behind Old Paper and Fresh Flowers

GRANHAND. pairs each fragrance’s notes with a short story. Kyujang takes its name from Kyujanggak, the library that housed royal books and documents in the Joseon dynasty. Kim recalls the question that prompted the name.

What might that room smell like?

— Kim Yeon-woo

A reddish-brown shelf full of old books appears in the story for Kyujang. Fig leaf and cinnamon sit alongside a woody base with fig fruit and eucalyptus. The name leads to the royal library, while the story and the composition bring it down to the scale of a book you can hold and open.

Susie Salmon takes its name from the protagonist of The Lovely Bones. The story accompanying the scent describes an afternoon with a bouquet and an apple. Lily of the valley and freesia meet apple and peach over white musk. GRANHAND. describes the result as a floral and fruity scent that sits close to the skin. The scent also appears in hand cream and sachets as well as Multi Perfume, finding a place both on the body and in the room.

Fabric Labels and a Fragrance Made for a Place

The woven fabric is visible on a bottle of Multi Perfume. GRANHAND. still makes labels by layering two pieces of fabric and applying them to the bottles individually. The planning team chose paper and cotton for packaging because it wanted textures that would feel at home in everyday surroundings.

For Hotel Anteroom Seoul, GRANHAND. worked with UDS on a scent called Pureusreum. The challenge was to give a place people might spend hours in a distinctive fragrance without making it overpowering. The team looked to grass growing between stones after rain and the freshness of morning dew. It combined the slight bitterness of rosemary and petitgrain with a water-soaked lotus impression, then used cedarwood and musk to balance the weight of the scent and shape its lingering trail.