The Penthouse: Inside K-Drama's Most Outrageous Luxury Set and What It Says About Desire

Hera Palace: A Building That Turned Ambition Into Architecture

The Penthouse: War in Life (2020–2021), SBS — [Official Poster]

There is a moment in the opening sequence of The Penthouse: War in Life that tells you exactly what kind of drama you are about to watch. Shim Su-ryeon, played by Lee Ji-ah, descends a sweeping staircase in an evening gown, her movement slow and deliberate, the light catching the crystal chandelier above her as the camera pulls back to reveal the full scale of the penthouse around her. It is not a subtle entrance. It was never meant to be. The Penthouse, which premiered on SBS in October 2020 and ran across three seasons through 2021, was not interested in restraint. It was interested in spectacle — in the idea that wealth, at its most extreme, becomes a kind of performance art. And at the center of that spectacle stood Hera Palace: a fictional 100-story luxury residential tower set in the heart of Gangnam, Seoul, whose visual identity would go on to become one of the most discussed and imitated design concepts in Korean drama history.

The visual language of Hera Palace: gold light, black marble, and a city that never stops watching.

The show follows three women bound together by rivalry, obsession, and the shared ambition of claiming the highest floor of Seoul's most coveted address. Shim Su-ryeon is the aristocratic queen of Hera Palace — elegant, composed, and harboring secrets that run to the darkest depths of the series. Cheon Seo-jin, played by Kim So-yeon, is a soprano of considerable talent and considerably fewer scruples, a woman whose identity is so completely fused with status that she cannot separate desire from destruction. And Oh Yoon-hee, played by Eugene, is the outsider clawing her way in — the woman who grew up without money and has spent her entire adult life trying to buy her way into the room where the chandeliers are always lit. Together and against each other, these three characters drive a story of murder, revenge, and corruption that earned a first-season finale rating of 28.8% nationwide, with a peak of 31.3% — making it the first Korean drama miniseries in five years to break the 30% threshold on a terrestrial channel.

What Maximalism Actually Looks Like: The Interior Design of Hera Palace

The exterior of Hera Palace does not exist. The building's dramatic façade — a gleaming, impossibly tall tower rising above Samseong-dong, Gangnam — was created entirely through CGI, a decision that freed the production team to construct the interior world as an entirely self-contained visual universe. The actual filming took place on purpose-built sets in Gyeonggi-do, with select scenes shot at Paradise City Hotel and Resort in Incheon, which provided the production with real architectural grandeur, including the golden horse statue that appears prominently in the drama's lobby sequences.

What the set designers built inside those studio walls is a textbook study in Korean maximalism — and a deliberate rejection of the restrained, Scandinavian-influenced minimalism that dominates much of contemporary Korean interior design. The penthouse belonging to Joo Dan-tae and Shim Su-ryeon operates on a different visual frequency entirely. It is a two-floor residence with ceilings high enough to suggest cathedral rather than home. The color palette anchors itself in black and white — a combination that reads as both luxury and threat — punctuated by crystalline chandeliers that drop from the upper level with almost theatrical extravagance. One wall is given entirely to a built-in screen system, a technology-forward gesture that sits in direct tension with the classical European proportions of the space. The kitchen, in contrast, floods with white light and features a long dining table designed for the performance of family, even when no warmth exists between the people seated at it.

The production detail extends to elements that most viewers would never consciously notice. German electrical brand JUNG supplied the switch and socket hardware for each Hera Palace unit, with different series specifically chosen to reflect the personality of each resident. Black aluminum switches from the LS 990 Dark line outfit the rooms of Joo Dan-tae, the murderous CEO. Classic brass fittings mark the spaces of Su-ryeon, conveying old nobility. Stainless steel hardware defines Cheon Seo-jin's apartment, cold and cutting. The point was that every surface of Hera Palace was calibrated to communicate something about the person living behind it. This is interior design functioning as character writing — a level of considered craft rarely seen in serialized drama production.

Opera as Architecture: How Sound Built the Visual World

One of The Penthouse's most distinctive creative decisions was to root its drama in the world of classical music and opera. Cheong-ah Arts School — the elite institution where the Hera Palace children compete for supremacy — is a place where arias echo through marble hallways and a soprano voice is treated as currency equivalent to real estate. The drama shoots these musical sequences with a visual intensity that mirrors the space: wide, high-ceilinged performance halls, spotlit stages, and the kind of concert attire that blurs the line between performance and identity. Cheon Seo-jin, as the school's star soprano, is almost always filmed in the context of her voice — the camera finding her at the piano, or onstage, or in full performance dress at moments that have nothing to do with singing, as if the costume itself communicates what words cannot.

In Hera Palace, every room is a stage — and every entrance is a performance.

The opera connection is not incidental. It gives the drama a structural framework for its visual excess. Opera is an art form built on the premise that ordinary emotional experience is not sufficient — that love, jealousy, betrayal, and grief must be expanded to fill a stage, amplified to reach the back of an auditorium, dressed in costumes that could never survive a Tuesday morning commute. The Penthouse understands this. It applies the same logic to its interior design, its costumes, and its blocking: everything is enlarged, elevated, and arranged for maximum visual impact. A slap is never just a slap in Hera Palace. It happens in a room with a thirty-foot ceiling. Every confrontation is staged in front of a chandelier or a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the city. The architecture is always complicit in the drama.

The Grammar of Makjang: Visual Excess as Emotional Argument

Korean drama has a genre category that has no precise equivalent in Western television: makjang. The word translates roughly as "taking things to the extreme," and it describes a mode of storytelling that embraces improbability, escalation, and the deliberate abandonment of realistic emotional proportion. Births are secret, deaths are faked, and twins appear at precisely the moments most dramatically useful. The Penthouse is makjang at its most unabashedly committed — and its visual language is the direct expression of that commitment. The excess of Hera Palace is not incidental to the drama. It is the drama.

In a more restrained production, the luxury setting would function as backdrop — a shorthand for wealth that frees the story to focus on character. In The Penthouse, the setting is the argument. By placing its characters in a space of such extreme visual grandeur, the drama makes a specific claim about what this kind of wealth does to people. The Hera Palace residents are not simply rich. They are people who have built their entire sense of self around the address on their key fob, the square footage above a certain floor, the chandelier over their staircase rather than someone else's. The visual maximalism of the space — every room too grand, every surface too polished, every angle too architectural for actual living — reflects the distortion that ambition has worked on each of them. They have built a world that matches their desires perfectly. And it has made them monstrous.

The Hera Palace lobby: where the goddess of ambition greets you every morning.

This is why Hera Palace needed to be a fantasy. The CGI exterior and the studio interiors are not production compromises — they are creative decisions. A real building could not have served the drama's visual argument, because real buildings exist in the ordinary world, where people look imperfect and staircases sometimes creak and chandeliers occasionally need dusting. Hera Palace exists outside that world. It is a space of pure aspiration and pure consequence, a place where the architecture has no function beyond the expression of power and the staging of its collapse.

The Residents We Remember: Three Wardrobes, Three Worlds

The visual identity of each Hera Palace resident extends from their apartment into their clothing, and the drama's costume department understood that these wardrobes were doing the same work as the interiors. Shim Su-ryeon — the drama's tragic figure and moral center — moves through the series in a consistently restrained palette of ivory, champagne, and deep navy, her silhouettes always elongated, her accessories always classical. She is dressed like a woman who has never needed to try, which is exactly what makes her tragedy so legible. When her composure finally breaks, it registers as all the more violent because of the immaculate surface it breaks through.

Cheon Seo-jin's wardrobe is the drama's most theatrical — structured blazers in jewel tones, performance gowns worn off the concert stage, and a consistent preference for silhouettes that announce arrival before she has crossed the threshold. Oh Yoon-hee, the outsider ascending, dresses aspirationally — her clothes always good, but always slightly effortful, betraying the calculation that her rivals can afford to conceal. In a drama where almost no one says what they mean and every alliance is temporary, the costumes become a more reliable text than dialogue. What each woman wears tells you who she believes she is — and, crucially, who she is afraid she might actually be.

Why Hera Palace Still Holds Its Ground

The Penthouse remained the number-one drama in Korea for twenty-one consecutive weeks across its first broadcast run, a figure that speaks to more than the narrative's compulsive watchability. The visual world of Hera Palace gave Korean audiences — and, through streaming platforms, international viewers — a space to engage with anxieties about class, aspiration, and the corruption of ambition that politer dramas tend to approach more carefully. There is something clarifying about maximalism pushed this far. When the desire for status is expressed through a building with a goddess statue in the lobby and a chandelier that requires its own maintenance contract, the absurdity of the desire becomes visible. Hera Palace is, finally, a mirror — the most expensive mirror money can buy, angled precisely to show you what you most want and most fear about wanting it.

Korean drama has produced more naturalistic depictions of wealth, more artful critiques of class, and more cinematically sophisticated explorations of ambition. But it has never produced anything quite as committed to the proposition that excess, taken seriously enough, becomes its own kind of truth. What would you sacrifice to live on the highest floor?

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