By GISELA WILLIAMS


SEOUL, South Korea - From the outside, the home of Simone Carena and Jihye Shin looks like a traditional Korean house, or hanok, with its carved wooden door and pagoda-style roof. But the cherry red Ducati parked out front hints at something unexpected inside: a modern, loft-like space in an eye-catching shade of bamboo green.

“We wanted a strong natural color that would bring the outside in,” said Mr. Carena, 41, a founding partner of Motoelastico, an architecture firm with offices in Seoul and Turin, Italy. “Similar to the contrast you get from bamboo leaves against a backdrop of black tiles.”

The couple bought the property in the Samcheong-dong district in the spring of 2007, for 280,500,000 South Korean won, or about $300,000 at the time. “Everyone we knew here thought we were crazy to buy a hanok,” said Mr. Carena, who moved to Seoul from Italy in 2001, to teach at the International Design School for Advanced Studies, now part of Hongik University.

At first, so did his wife, a fashion designer who grew up in a hanok nearby and remembered what it was like to live in a house without modern amenities .

“Even my parents advised us against it,” said Ms. Shin, 31. “But I believed in Simone.”

It turned out to be the right decision. In recent years, the neighborhood has become one of Seoul’s most fashionable districts , Mr. Carena said, and the property has tripled in value.

Because the house was in “very bad condition,” he said, they decided to tear it down and build a new one instead of renovating, reusing the original roof tiles and foundation stones.

Mr. Carena and his partner at Motoelastico, Marco Bruno, designed a U-shaped structure, positioning it so that the opening - and the courtyard - would face west, offering views over the surrounding rooftops, toward the sunset. “And towards Italy,” he said.

The construction cost about $150,000 and was a constant battle, he said, because skilled traditional builders are hard to find - they work almost exclusively on large jobs, like museums or palaces, for organizations that can pay their high fees - and most of them tend to be wary of unconventional design solutions.

Soon after Mr. Carena and Ms. Shin moved into the two-story, 102-squaremeter home in April, they discovered leaks around the windows above the kitchen cabinets.

So Mr. Carena came up with an innovative solution: a “little microsystem,” as he put it, that uses gutters and plastic funnels to direct rainwater into flycatcher plants and a miniature herb garden.

The house is full of concealed storage and clever design ideas. A window cut into the courtyard floor and framed with mirrors brings light into the cellar room below . A tiny terrace set on top of the kitchen offers the couple and their 1-year-old son, Felice, a place to enjoy the view of Mount Inwang during the summer.

“This house is a puzzle of open views and hidden storage,’’ Mr. Carena said. Of course, all those open views make it easy for others to look in.

“One of our neighbors warned us one day that he saw us dancing in the kitchen,’’ Mr. Carena said. “We didn’t mind, but I built a small blind for his sake.’’