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Oct 5 2015 at 10:49 AM

Updated Oct 5 2015 at 10:49 AM

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Art Nouveau festival celebrates Brussels little known splendour

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The Taverne bar at the Hotel L'Esperance.

by Robert Bevan

Freemasonry, industrial espionage and nationalism are an unlikely trio but they each
had their part to play in making Brussels the Art Nouveau city par excellence.
Its heritage of some 4000 Art Nouveau buildings and several thousand more Art
Deco structures is celebrated this year in the city's eighth Art Nouveau Art Deco
Biennale. Walk down almost any street in the underrated Belgian capital and
examples of sensual Art Nouveau style and its jazzy inter-war successor Deco are
there to see in theatres, shops, a cemetery, apartment blocks, cafes, churches.

WORLD HERITAGE SITE

Over four weekends in October, dozens of special interiors not usually open to the
public, including private homes, ofces and schools, open their doors supplemented
by a program of bus, walking and bike tours, antique fairs and concerts.

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Art Deco can be experienced at the small Hotel L'Esperance.

Among the highlights are four houses by the presiding genius of Art Nouveau Victor
Horta, now listed as a World Heritage Site.
While Art Nouveau is named for a Parisian gallery and has its origins in the English
Arts and Crafts movement, it is in Brussels that the style fully owered at the end of
the 19th century.
Belgium, a relatively young and expanding nation wanted a forward-looking national
architectural style and seized upon it. With a then mighty industrial sector including
textile know-how derived from sneaking out machinery from England it had the

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money to pay for it.

The city doubled in size with the construction of entire new suburbs. A group of
architects and designers, including Horta as well as a number of his clients, were
freemasons or socialists and determinedly anti-clerical in a country riven by religious

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divisions.

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There are also numerous B&Bs in Art Nouveau buildings including the recently-opened Maison Flagey.

Among the rarely opened buildings this month will be two early Horta houses, the
Maison Autrique and the Htel Tassel (htel in this context meaning a mansion) that
helped boost the new style's popularity.
With their daringly exposed steel structures matched with tropical hardwoods,
Tiffany stained glass glowing lustrously under electric lights, and top-lit winding
staircases off which open plan rooms unravel, they inuenced a generation entranced
by this marriage of craft and industry; dreamlike spaces and all mod cons.

EMBLEMATIC OF THE GENRE

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The asymmetrical trailing vine wall painting on the stairs of the 1893 Tassel house has
become emblematic of the genre. It is a shame that the building is now occupied by
the dreary ofces of a European food standards campaign and otherwise has a
predictably bureaucratic atmosphere.

The asymmetrical trailing vine wall painting on the stairs of the 1893 Tassel house has become emblematic of the
Art Nouveau genre.

A joy of the Biennale, however, is being able to sticky beak behind the doors of lived-in
homes with the owners sometimes on-hand to guide you.
One pocket-sized wonder is the tall and narrow Strauven House in the Nouveaucrammed suburb of Schaerbeek. Just 375 centimetres wide, architect Gustave

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Strauven's own house from 1902 has a clever banana-shaped plan that wraps around
the back of a corner building with ornate facades piled up on adjacent streets.
Restored from a ruin by its present owners, you squeeze through tiny, charming
rooms, teetering with precious china and corals and nose at their music collections
(Yazoo to Debussy).
Close to hand is the elegant Squares District, studded with elegant Art Nouveau
townhouses set around lush gardens and fountains. The new style touched every
aspect of city life from clocks and cars (the private D'ieteren Gallery of 100 classic cars
is also letting in visitors during the Biennale) to street lights.

VIEWED WITH DISTASTE

It wasn't just a design approach for the rich, however, with state primary schools such
as the 1907 La Ruche group by Henri Jacobs with decorative coloured brick and the
curly tendrils of its steel beams enclosing a covered playground hidden behind the
grand front door. The aim was a modern, secular education for all.
Yet in the post-war period, Art Nouveau was viewed with distaste nervy, fussy, sleazy
even with some 75 per cent of Brussels' buildings from the period demolished well
into the 1970s. Its cause wasn't helped by the disastrous L'Innovation department
store re in 1967 that killed 323 people in not much more than 10 minutes and gutted
Horta's innovate building. Horta's Waucquez store survives though as a museum
dedicated to the comic strip.
Art Deco had, in any case, supplanted Art Nouveau after the First World War and
whole districts such as upmarket Uccle were built in the new modern manner. There
are some astonishing buildings such as St Augustine's Church, a concrete Deco rocket
ship built at the city's highest point and whose tower you will be able to climb up
during the Biennale to survey Brussels below.

STOLEN BY A NAZI
Nearby is the Van Buuren's house and its picturesque garden, built by a wealthy Dutch
banker and art collector in the Amsterdam School style an appealing blend of the
Art Deco, Modernist and the Arts and Crafts. Mrs Van Burren had the furniture made
by Dominique of Paris the leading exponent of the Deco style and bought a rare
Deco baby grand once owned by composer Erik Satie. All is preserved as a house
museum apart from the library whose books were stolen by a Nazi ofcer while the
Jewish Van Burrens took refuge in the US during the war.
Still rmly shut to outsiders, unfortunately, is the many times grander Palais Stoclet, a
family mansion built by architect Josef Hoffmann and one of the most important early
20th century houses in Europe. Its lavish interiors painted by Klimt lie empty but are
off limits while the four heiress daughters of the Stoclet family disagree over its
future.
The Van Burren Museum, though, is open regularly outside the Biennale as is Victor
Horta's own wonderful house that's in the throes of expansion but an absolute musthttp://www.afr.com/lifestyle/a-nouveau-art-in-old-brussels-20150930-gjxtzq

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see. Its glazed brick dining room was revolutionary. The former Old England
department store with its decorative steel and glass facades is also open year-round.
The views from its rooftop caf are as spectacular as its service is abysmal. And,
amazingly, genuine Art Nouveau and Art Deco items can still be ferreted out with
surprising ease in the city's many ea markets and vintage shops.

DECO EXPERIENCE
If you want to see behind normally closed inlaid doors during the Biennale, you need
to book a place in advance because the event is increasingly popular with tourists as
well as interested Belgians. Some hotels can help. The Rocco Forte owned Hotel
Amigo, a comfortable and grand affair just off the splendidly gilded Grand Place offers
Biennale packages with special room rates and weekend passes.
There are also numerous B&Bs in Art Nouveau buildings (including the recentlyopened Maison Flagey) although none with bedrooms in the style. The fully
immersive Deco experience can be had in Room Three of the small Hotel L'Esperance
above the preserved Taverne bar. The bedroom has a creaky but original panelled
interior complete with stiff red velvet curtains and in-room roll top bath but is
otherwise basic and in a grubby corner of the city centre.
What Brussels is not short of is Art Nouveau restaurants, bar and caf interiors. From
the boho Sainte-Catherine quartier to the chichi Upper Town, there are original
period places aplenty all carved wood and sinuous glass, mirrors, and metal lamps.
A suitable last call for a drink (food reports are mixed) could be the faded green
fantasy 1904 restaurant interior of the De Ultieme Hallucinatie The Ultimate
Hallucination. Make that an absinthe.

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