If you have ever stayed in a Korean home — or even browsed Korean interior accounts online — you may have noticed something quietly missing from the bed. There is no top sheet. No flat sheet pulled taut beneath the comforter. No folded-down layer at the pillow's edge. Just a single duvet, sometimes a fitted sheet underneath, and nothing in between.
For visitors from the United States or Europe, this can feel like an oversight. In Western bedding culture, the top sheet is considered a fundamental layer — a hygienic barrier between the body and the comforter, something that gets washed weekly while the duvet itself is cleaned less often. Its absence in Korean homes tends to prompt the same question: why?
The answer is not simple preference. It connects to how Korean homes are heated, how bedding culture developed over generations, and how domestic habits are structured around a different idea of cleanliness.
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| A typical Korean bedroom setup — one comforter, no top sheet |
The Floor Comes First
To understand Korean bedding, you have to start with ondol — the underfloor heating system that has defined Korean domestic life for centuries. Traditional ondol worked by running heated air through channels beneath stone floors, warming the surface from below. Modern Korean apartments use a water-pipe version of the same principle, embedded in concrete floors, connected to a central boiler system.
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| Ondol, the underfloor heating system that changed how Koreans sleep |
The result is that Korean rooms are heated from the ground up. The floor is warm. The air near the ceiling stays cooler. This fundamentally changes how people relate to sleep.
In homes where heat rises from radiators or blows from ceiling vents, the logic of layered bedding makes practical sense. You need to trap warmth close to the body. A top sheet, a blanket, a duvet — each layer adds insulation. But in an ondol room, the floor itself is the heater. The warmth comes from below, spreads horizontally, and fills the lower half of the room steadily. A single comforter, in this context, is not minimal. It is sufficient.
Korean bedding adapted to this environment over a very long time. The traditional Korean sleeping setup involved a thin mat or a folded blanket directly on the heated floor, covered by a single thick duvet called a ibul (이불). There were no bed frames. No box springs. No layering system designed to compensate for drafts and cold floors. The floor itself was doing the thermal work.
The Duvet Cover Handles What the Top Sheet Was Meant To Do
One of the main functions of a top sheet in Western practice is hygiene. The duvet or comforter is difficult to wash frequently — it is heavy, it takes a long time to dry, and repeated washing shortens its lifespan. The top sheet acts as a washable intermediary, protecting the comforter from direct skin contact.
Korean households solve this differently. The standard practice is to use a duvet cover — a full fabric case that encloses the comforter entirely and is removed and washed regularly. Rather than adding a layer between the body and the duvet, the duvet itself gets a washable outer layer.
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| The layered Western bedding system looks unfamiliar to most Korean households |
This approach is, functionally, equivalent. The skin touches fabric that is laundered frequently. The comforter inside stays clean. The difference is structural: instead of a flat sheet beneath the duvet, there is a fitted cover around it. It produces the same hygienic outcome with one fewer piece of bedding.
From a practical standpoint, the duvet cover system is also easier to manage in a typical Korean apartment. Korean washing machines tend to run smaller cycles. Korean apartments, particularly in urban areas, often lack space for large drying racks or outdoor lines year-round. The top sheet, which requires its own wash cycle, its own folding, its own storage, adds steps that the duvet cover system eliminates.
Habits Built Around Airing, Not Layering
Korean domestic culture places significant emphasis on airing bedding rather than washing it constantly. On dry, clear days — particularly in spring and autumn — it is common to see comforters hanging from apartment balconies across entire residential buildings. The practice is so normalized that most Korean apartments are designed with balcony railings at a height convenient for draping bedding over them.
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| Bedding folded and aired — a common morning routine in Korean homes |
Sunlight exposure and fresh air are considered essential to maintaining bedding hygiene, not just supplementary. This approach shifts the emphasis away from adding and washing more fabric layers, and toward regular airing of a single, well-maintained piece.
The top sheet, in this context, does not fit naturally into the rhythm. It cannot be easily aired the way a comforter can. It adds to laundry frequency without aligning with the core domestic habit. Most Korean households simply do not find it necessary.
When Bedding Moved Off the Floor
As Western-style bed frames became more common in Korean homes from the 1990s onward — a shift driven partly by changing apartment designs and partly by generational preference — the bedding structure did not simply import Western habits wholesale. Koreans adopted the bed frame but retained the single-duvet approach.
This is worth noting because it illustrates how domestic habits do not change entirely just because furniture changes. The bed frame arrived. The top sheet largely did not. The duvet cover system continued. The morning habit of folding and airing bedding adapted to the new height rather than disappearing.
Today, Korean bedrooms vary widely in style. Some are minimalist, some quite layered with decorative cushions and throws. But the absence of a top sheet remains consistent across most households, regardless of how contemporary or Western-influenced the overall interior looks.
What Visitors Often Misread
Travelers or expats who notice the missing top sheet sometimes interpret it as a sign of informality or a gap in domestic standards. This is a misreading. Korean households are not less attentive to cleanliness — in many respects, domestic hygiene routines in Korean homes are more structured than in many Western households. Shoes removed at the door, frequent floor cleaning, regular bedding rotation — these are standard, not exceptional.
The top sheet is absent not because it was forgotten, but because the system that developed here never required it. Ondol heating made deep layering unnecessary. Duvet covers handled the hygiene function. Airing became the primary maintenance method. Each element reinforced the others, and over generations, a coherent bedding culture took shape that simply works differently.
Understanding this makes the absence feel less like a gap and more like a different answer to the same set of questions every household has to solve: How do you stay warm? How do you keep bedding clean? How do you make the daily routine manageable?
Korean homes arrived at one answer. It just does not include a top sheet.
FRANVIA explains everyday life in Korea — not as a destination, but as a place people actually live.
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