The Place for Better Life — An Inevitable Space for a Beneficial Lifestyle

The Place for Better Life — An Inevitable Space for a Beneficial Lifestyle

An unmanned laundromat, a tea house, and an EV charging station all in one place? It’s possible at ‘Urban Laundret The Terrace’ in Yongin, Gyeonggi-do.

Words Parc Jinmyoung
Interviewee Seo Kyeongno (CEO of Korea Laundry)

There are times when an ordinary, meaningless task at home feels special when you’re traveling. Perhaps every moment of travel feels this way, but for me, doing laundry was especially so. Carrying an armful of dirty clothes to a coin laundromat makes me feel like I’ve deeply infiltrated life in this unfamiliar place. The local scent mingled with the faint smell of detergent, the pages of a book I idly flip through while waiting for the wash to finish, conversations exchanged in an unfamiliar language. Diligently taking care of everyday tasks abroad, just as I do at home, feels both new and peaceful. It’s a strange feeling.
Whether it’s because many people relate to this experience, or because of the rise in single-person households, it’s not entirely clear, but well-branded laundry services have been catching my eye lately. From washing to drying, this is a space where you might stay anywhere from an hour to over four hours—so why not add something else to enjoy while you’re there? ‘Urban Laundret,’ the unmanned laundromat located in Cheongdam and Seocho in Seoul, has introduced ‘Urban Laundret The Terrace,’ a space that combines a tea house and an EV charging station.

📝 Note 1. How did the combination of an unmanned laundromat, café, and EV charging station come about?

Please give us a brief introduction to Urban Laundret.
We’re a brand that proposes a better lifestyle, driven by a desire to preserve the things we love for a long time. In particular, we look at laundry services from a new perspective and approach them innovatively. We use high-efficiency laundry equipment to save as much water and electricity as possible, and we protect health and the environment with eco-friendly, non-toxic, biodegradable detergents and fabric softeners. In a sense, we carry a mission to protect both sustainable living and the planet at the same time.

So you’re proposing a sustainable lifestyle through laundry.
As the exclusive importer of the German appliance brand Miele, we’ve continuously researched how to keep fabrics in good condition for longer. That led us to think about a healthy, eco-friendly organic laundry service. Starting in 2022, we began introducing Lagoon dryers from Sweden’s Electrolux, which apply eco-friendly technology. It’s wet-cleaning equipment that uses eco-friendly detergents and technology to replace dry cleaning. All the products used at Urban Laundret are also made from eco-friendly materials. All plastic wrap is 100 percent biodegradable, and the packaging for our detergents and fabric softeners is made from recycled plastic waste. For deliveries, we use paper packaging and paper tape, minimizing unnecessary packaging.

‘Urban Laundret The Terrace’ in Yongin consists of a café on the first floor and a laundromat on the second, with an EV charging station set up in the yard. I’m curious how this idea came about.
Urban Laundret’s core value starts with ‘Keep Clean, Green.’ When we applied this philosophy to a physical space, we thought of an eco-friendly laundromat, a café offering healthy drinks and food, and an environmentally conscious EV charging station. It occurred to us that we could combine these three functions into one space. We wanted it to be a place where people experience our brand philosophy, not just a place that sells services. Perhaps these three elements were an inevitable part of what Urban Laundret The Terrace had to be.

I heard the café only uses local ingredients for its menu.
It’s a café with a tea house concept, offering blended teas that capture the essential flavor of the tea leaves and baked goods made with healthy ingredients. The blended teas use tea leaves grown using traditional methods in Hadong. We carefully select teas that reflect seasonal ingredients or regional characteristics to present menu items with their natural flavors intact. Our signature menu items are ‘Jinpi Mogwa,’ based on citron tea, and ‘Urban Therapy Tea,’ blended with rosemary and natural honey.

📝 Note 2. Why businesses should take the lead in environmental protection.

Were there any travel spots you referenced while launching Urban Laundret?
While starting our unmanned laundry business, we visited many countries and cities. Nearby destinations like Japan and Taiwan, and farther ones like Sweden, Copenhagen in Denmark, and Washington, California, New York, and Portland in the US. The cities that left the deepest impression on us were Kyoto in Japan and the western part of Washington in the US. There was a lot to learn from their thoughtful spatial layouts and service offerings.

Urban Laundret is currently participating in a tree-planting project as part of its environmental protection efforts. What inspired your interest in this kind of movement?
No one attaches, or expects, any value from laundry beyond ‘making clothes clean.’ But think back to a time when laundry wasn’t as convenient as it is now. Nothing was as eco-friendly and sustainable as washing clothes with just water. We can’t go back to the past, but as technology advances and human convenience increases, we wanted to help restore even a small part of the nature that’s been harmed along the way. As we’ve grown accustomed to busy daily life, ‘fast and cheap’ has become one of our society’s key value standards. We need to recognize that protecting hygiene, health, and nature—even if it’s a bit slower and costs more—is a fundamental unit of sustainable living.

Why do you think businesses should take the lead in proposing an eco-friendly lifestyle?
Environmentally friendly initiatives come with costs. You need to be among the first to put them into practice, and capital is needed to encourage participation and win people’s sympathy. In the end, I believe companies that have capital need to take an active role.

📝 Note 3. Even if the path toward sustainability is a bit bumpy.

What does a sustainable life mean to you?
For instance, imagine flying toward a destination—even amid storms, wind, or thunder and lightning—always maintaining the right posture and balance, and arriving safely with everyone on board. Isn’t that exactly what a sustainable life is? I believe a life guided by good intentions inevitably comes paired with a sustainable way of achieving it.

What are your plans and goals going forward?
I’d like to create a global standard manual in the field of eco-friendly wet-cleaning garment care. I hope to contribute, even a little, to helping more people build healthier lives, and to run a righteous business through Urban Laundret while generating sustainable profit.

📝 Note 4. These days, large cafés have been popping up all over the outskirts of Seoul and its suburbs. Big buildings rise on vast plots of land, built to serve as cafés, yet every time I visit one, something always feels a little lacking. Urban Laundret The Terrace fills that emptiness I always felt at large cafés with real substance. Even without laundry to do or an EV to charge, simply visiting this place feels like sharing in the same values. Perhaps that’s exactly the direction the brand is heading toward.