Kim Yong-im opens her Kangnam home: glamour, hanbok and hidden boxes

Singer Kim Yong-im opened the doors to her 80-pyeong home in Kangnam on KBS2's Mr. House Husband Season 2. It was not a house tour built only around a glamorous dressing room. As Kim gave Park Seo-jin advice on how to organize his belongings, she also showed herself wavering in front of her own storage space, allowing the veteran singer on stage and the everyday Kim Yong-im at home to appear in the same frame.

The June 13 broadcast of KBS2's Mr. House Husband Season 2 showed Kim Yong-im inviting siblings Park Seo-jin and Choi Hyo-jung to her home. As they entered, the first things that drew attention were the high heels filling the entryway and the spacious living room. The program then revealed a dressing room where her stage outfits and hanbok were neatly arranged.

Kim Yong-im kept her performance costumes inside mesh covers she had made herself, storing each outfit so it could be taken out and worn immediately for the stage. For a trot singer, clothing is part of the performance. Just as much as the song and movement, the colors, ornamentation and lines of a hanbok reach the audience first. In that sense, Kim's dressing room felt less like a hobby space and more like a workroom built from years of live performances.

The focus of the episode moved naturally from organizing Park Seo-jin's home to looking at Kim Yong-im's own. Kim advised Park, who finds it hard to throw things away, that items that no longer make his heart flutter should be discarded. She told him to sort out books, notebooks and old household goods that he rarely used.

Park Seo-jin seemed to follow his senior's advice, but when he saw the tightly packed shoe cabinet at Kim Yong-im's house, he pushed back by saying that she had told him to throw things away even though she owned so many shoes. The twist came in a room introduced as a guest room. When the door opened, empty boxes and rarely used items were piled inside, and even a broken safe remained as evidence of things she had not been able to discard.

Kim's husband told her to clear out the empty boxes, and Kim Yong-im eventually admitted that the real housekeeping expert was actually her husband. In the moment when someone who had seemed like a perfect housekeeping teacher could not easily make decisions about her own belongings, the everyday variety-show atmosphere associated with Mr. House Husband came alive.

After the organizing was finished, Kim Yong-im prepared a 19-dish table setting for Park Seo-jin and Choi Hyo-jung. Following the reveal of the eye-catching home, the meal changed the tone of the scene. If the segment had focused only on the size of the house or the number of possessions, it could have ended as simple spectacle, but the conversation at the table showed Kim's relationship with Park Seo-jin in a different way.

Kim Yong-im said that when she first saw Park Seo-jin, she had wondered whether he would be able to succeed, but that he had now grown a great deal. Park Seo-jin, in turn, expressed gratitude to Kim for protecting him in the past when he made a mistake on stage.

Kim Yong-im's 80-pyeong home was the attention-grabbing subject of this broadcast, but the episode left more than the image of a large residence. It also showed how a singer with a long stage career handles her costumes and belongings, and how she offers both nagging and a meal to a junior artist.