How to read a Korean building, floor by floor, before you go in

A Korean address gets you to the right building. After that you are on your own, because the building is not one shop — it is a vertical street, and the thing you came for might be on the fourth floor or one level underground.

The sign column is a directory

On most commercial buildings the signs stack in a single illuminated column, one panel per floor, usually in order from the ground up. A café on two, a dermatology clinic on three, a billiards hall on five — the column is a building directory written in neon. Read it from the street before you go looking for an entrance, and you will know which elevator button you need.

The number beside a business name is almost always the floor, not a street number. When a café's card says it sits on 3F, that is the third floor by the local count, which matches the Western count here — the ground floor is 1F, not 0.

Underground is not a basement to avoid

The sign marked B1 — jiha (지하), literally "under the ground" — often hides the room you actually want. Whole restaurants, record bars, and bathhouses live one or two floors down, reached by a staircase just inside the door or tucked beside the building. A place being underground says nothing about its quality here; some of the most careful coffee in Seoul is poured below street level.

지하 1층 카페가 1층 카페보다 조용한 경우가 많습니다.

The address ends at the door

Korea uses road-name addresses — doro-myeong juso (도로명 주소) — so a pin dropped in Kakao Map or Naver Map lands you at the building, not the unit. The last step is vertical, and no map will walk it for you. Note the floor from the business listing before you leave the station, and the sign column outside will confirm it.