A retro American gymnasium buried inside a bedding company’s cultural complex — and somehow, it totally works.
If someone told you that one of the most photographed café experiences in Gyeonggi Province was created by a mattress brand, you’d probably raise an eyebrow. But that’s exactly what Simmons — yes, the bedding company — has pulled off at Simmons Grocery Store Icheon, and it genuinely earns every bit of the hype.
Located within Simmons Terrace, the brand’s multi-purpose cultural complex in Icheon, this space is less a café and more an immersive time-travel experience into vintage American sports culture. Think peeling locker rooms, hardwood basketball courts, stacks of VHS tapes, SLAM Magazine covers on the wall, and a Chicago-style hot dog as the star menu item. It’s wildly specific, meticulously designed, and somehow completely cohesive.
What Is Simmons Terrace, Exactly?
Before diving into the Grocery Store itself, it helps to understand the larger context. Simmons Terrace (988 Sasil-ro, Moga-myeon, Icheon-si, Gyeonggi-do) is the Korean bedding brand’s flagship cultural destination — a complex that includes mattress showrooms, a brand museum, exhibition spaces, and the Grocery Store café all rolled into one. It’s located conveniently next to Icheon Termeden, about an hour’s drive from Seoul.
The entire campus is built with a clean, industrial-modernist brick exterior — long horizontal windows, cobblestone plazas, and colourful picnic tables with striped beach umbrellas scattered outside. It’s the kind of place that photographs well in every season: cherry blossom pink in spring, lush green in summer, fiery foliage in autumn, and a beloved Christmas illumination event in winter that draws close to 100,000 visitors annually.
The Grocery Store occupies a key building within this complex, and it’s where the real personality of the Simmons brand comes alive.
The Concept: American College Meets Basketball Gym
Designed by Simmons Design Studio (the brand’s in-house creative team), the Icheon Grocery Store draws its aesthetic from American college cafeterias and gymnasium culture. The brief, as described by the studio, was to create a setting where visitors could enjoy food, drinks, and branded merchandise — all wrapped in the nostalgic energy of a 1990s American sports environment.
Walking in, you’re immediately hit by the contrast between the industrial exterior and the warm, crimson-and-cream interior. The lower half of the walls are painted a deep maroon red, while exposed white-painted roof trusses soar overhead. Industrial pendant lamps in aged galvanised metal hang from long black cables. The floor is polished concrete throughout most of the first floor, but upstairs, you’re walking on a proper hardwood basketball court.
This isn’t decoration. The second floor genuinely functions as a basketball hall, complete with court markings, a real hoop at the far end, stadium-style orange seats along one wall, wooden grandstand benches along another, and championship pennant banners hanging from the rafters. A large flat-screen TV above a dark glazed-tile wall broadcasts basketball games. It’s the kind of space that makes you want to sit down, eat a hot dog, and watch a game — which is, of course, exactly the point.
The First Floor: Café, Counter, and Nostalgia
The ground level is a long, corridor-like space running the full length of the building. On one side, a row of wall-bench seating with small round tables faces large windows shaded by dark wooden venetian blinds — perfectly filtering the afternoon light into warm, layered strips. On the opposite side, a long warm-toned wooden counter runs the length of the room, lined with high bar stools.
Near the entrance, you’ll find the merchandise section. Shelves stocked with Simmons-branded basketballs, ceramic containers, tote bags, and apparel sit beside a mini basketball hoop mounted on the wall. A framed display of vintage jackets — a Lakers gold bomber among them — adds another layer of Americana to the room.
The ordering counter is set against a whitewashed brick wall, with a digital menu overhead displaying the day’s offerings. The menu leans heavily into American diner territory: Street Dog, Chicago Hot Dog, New York Combo, and Cinnamon Tail Crunch are among the options, with soft drinks and coffee rounding out the selection. The Chicago Hot Dog — with its ketchup, mustard, and all the toppings — was reportedly developed entirely in-house, from recipe to plating. Framed retro posters advertising “Chicago Hot Dog, Combo 10.8” hang on the walls like artefacts from another era.
On the counter beside the espresso machine: a retro CRT television from National, sitting on top of a VCR, surrounded by a teetering tower of VHS tapes. The Basketball Diaries, Jerry Maguire, Legends of the Fall, Beethoven, Terminator 2 — someone put real thought into that stack.
The Second Floor: Locker Room, Court, and Cool
Take the wide wooden staircase up, and you pass through a narrow corridor flanked by dark timber panels, with rows of SLAM Magazine covers mounted gallery-style on a whitewashed brick wall. It’s a clever visual handoff — the moment where the café downstairs transitions fully into sports territory.
The upper floor opens into two distinct zones. The back half of the building is the basketball court itself: gleaming hardwood floors with painted arc lines, vaulted white-truss ceilings, and the full atmospheric weight of a real gymnasium. Along one wall, locker-style display cases in olive green mesh hold Simmons merchandise — jerseys, basketballs, photos, and branded accessories. A vintage boombox sits on top. A clock on the wall reads “Pacific Time.”
The front half of the upper floor serves as a seating and event space, with long wooden benches and walls covered in basketball photography, posters, and ephemera — Allen Iverson, old finals coverage, championship memorabilia. It has the energy of a school gym that’s been lovingly lived-in for decades, not recently constructed.
Locker room-style bench seating with overhead hooks carries the theme further. Simmons jerseys (including a white pinstripe number with #3 and the SIMMONS name) hang alongside mesh bags holding basketballs. It’s part café, part museum, part film set.
The Outdoor Space
The plazas surrounding the Grocery Store building are equally well-considered. Multicoloured cobblestones in a mosaic pattern cover the ground, tactile guide strips run in yellow stripes, and picnic tables with vibrant striped umbrellas — red-and-white, navy-and-white, orange-and-white, yellow-and-white — are scattered about. On sunny days, the outdoor seating fills up fast.
A sign pointing toward “Heritage Alley” is visible on one wall, hinting at the wider narrative Simmons has woven across the whole Terrace complex.
Practical Information
| Address | 988 Sasil-ro, Moga-myeon, Icheon-si, Gyeonggi-do |
| Hours | Mon–Thu, Sun: 11:00 – 20:00 / Fri–Sat: 11:00 – 21:00 |
| Getting There | Approx. 1 hour from Seoul by car; located next to Icheon Termeden |
| Parking | On-site parking available (can fill up during peak seasons) |
| Menu Range | Hot dogs from approx. ₩6,800; combos from ₩8,800–10,800; coffee & drinks |
| @simmonsgrocerystore |
Is It Worth the Trip?
Absolutely — and not just for the food. Simmons Grocery Store Icheon is one of the more thoughtful examples of brand experience design in Korea right now. The team at Simmons Design Studio hasn’t slapped basketball imagery onto a generic café space; they’ve committed to a genuinely specific slice of American cultural nostalgia — the gymnasium, the locker room, the diner counter, the VHS tape — and executed it with impressive consistency and craft.
Whether you’re an architecture enthusiast, a café photographer, a basketball fan, or just someone looking for a genuinely different day trip from Seoul, the Simmons Terrace complex — and the Grocery Store at its heart — offers something that’s hard to find elsewhere: a brand that seems to actually enjoy itself.
Come for the Chicago hot dog. Stay for the hardwood court.
