brussels ghent office building with mansion inside

Rather than being a typical outbuilding, the new house is made into an independent universe precisely by the visual experience of detaching it from the original one. On entering the summer house, the winter house ‘disappears’, conjured away by the mirrored-glass doors placed in the corners of the perimeter. ‘Our success is also thanks to the wealth of private clients and the rich cultural context that exists in Brussels,’ says Geers. The current castle dates from 1180 and was the residence of the Counts of Flanders until 1353. Opened in 2017 across the top two floors of the turn-of-the-20th-century building, it was developed by Zannier Hotels, the Belgian company whose properties in Cambodia and Namibia bring Flemish chic to far-flung locations.

Geers had been working in Rotterdam, Van Severen in Ghent, and their first project, a small notary’s office in the city, won them attention. When visiting Ghent for a few hours as we travelled across Belgium we walked past the stunningly well reserved 10th Century moated castle that is the Gravensteen. Once the city’s grand old post office, 1898 The Post is now its grand new hotel. The remaining spaces between the frame and the garden wall accommodate a garden shed, an outdoor kitchen and a firewood store. Van Severen and Geers formed their practice in Brussels in 2002. An intermediate climate prevails in this roofed section, enclosed by sliding panels of single glass. The expansion of a nineteenth-century townhouse in the heart of Ghent resulted in a second house – a ‘summer house’ marked out by a precise modular frame of steel sections, overgrown with grapevines, that sits in the irregular outdoor space alongside the existing ‘winter house.’ A narrow strip of this modular frame, hard against the existing house, is roofed with steel grilles that rest on six slender fins of polished steel.

Brussels ghent office building with mansion inside