Daelim Changgo Gallery CO:LUMN (대림창고 갤러리 컬럼 also known as 성수동대림창고갤러리) is probably one of my favorite industrial café that I visited when this type of cafe started becoming popular in Seoul. Prior to my visit to Cafe Onion, I actually stumbled upon this cafe way before. Two years ago to be exact. Let me tell you what makes this place one of my favorite. As you may know, Seoul has a lot of cafes. The cafe culture here is pretty big and you won’t have a problem finding cafes to hang out at. What I found out from my multiple explorations is that there are more smaller cafes in Seoul than the spacious ones. You’ll be more likely to find cafes with ten to twenty seatings in different neighborhoods than cafes with seatings more than that (I’m talking about the non-chain cafes here. Not the big chain cafes).
Located in an industrial neighborhood and having big storage buildings as neighbors, Daelim Changgo’s exterior doesn’t necessarily screams hip cafe (the building was used as a storage space and a rice mill at some point after all). I thought it was a foundry at first. For real! I took a peek from one of the windows and saw what seemed to be a metal sculpture on display. I was curious what this place actually is and decided to hang around for a bit.
After a couple of minutes, I noticed that different groups of young people start entering the building through the big wooden door. And they don’t look like they work or have any business in a foundry. Most of them look like college students or group of girls that are hanging out. At that point, I concluded that this place is probably not a foundry and decided to follow one group of girls that was entering the wooden door to check out the place.
Imagine my surprise when I walked into the space and found out that it’s actually a cafe and art gallery. The space was huge for a cafe. Exposed beams, high ceilings, and the combination of concrete and brick walls give this whole place a very industrial vibes. But combine that with the art installations, furnitures, and plants that they placed around the space, they actually made it a pretty cool place to hang out at. And not only that, the cafe also have four different seating areas in this space—two different section on the ground floor and a more smaller area on the second floor and a rooftop area if you want to enjoy the weather. I mean, you gotta understand, to me this felt like such a contrast to the cafes I’ve been to prior to my visit to this place. And it was so good to found a place that is so different than the ones I’ve been to before. Granted these days, there are probably more cafes like this in Seoul but at least back then, this was still pretty rare I have to say.
Anyways, I ended up hanging out here for a bit. Ordered a drink, took a break, and looked around the space. My tip for you is this is a good place to go to when you are hanging out in a bigger groups. The chance of you finding enough seats for everyone is probably higher here since they have a lot of seating areas (although the place gets pretty busy during the weekend). They also have extensive food and drink menu. For drinks, they serve coffee, tea, non-coffee options as well as beer. For their food options, they serve desserts and also lunch and dinner menu ranging from soup, salad, pasta, and pizza. Plenty to choose from. And oh, one more thing, if you do come to this place, give that big wooden door a good push when you are entering. The door is quite heavy and it does took some effort to get it to move ;)
