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Dutch architecture practice Kaan Architecten has concealed a minimalist wing within the existing 19th-century structure of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. More
Belgium-based Adjo Studio has used large wooden joinery elements to organise the interior of a penthouse apartment in Hasselt.Penthouse BV features a broken-plan layout, meaning that it is neither open-plan nor divided into rooms. Instead, a series of partitions and furniture elements help to subtly divide the space into different areas.
Spanning floor-to-ceiling and made from cheery wood veneer, these elements include bookshelves, kitchen cabinets and wardrobe closets.
Wooden joinery elements include a hearth that frames the lounge and library areas
The penthouse is the home of an entrepreneurial couple who relocated from the suburbs to the city centre.
Adjo Studio designers Adriana Strojek and Joachim Bekkers wanted to give the pair the same feelings of spaciousness and connection to nature that they had experienced in their previous residence, even though they are now five storeys up.
However, they also needed to create a practical home with separation between different functions. For instance, the couple needed a dedicated office so that work and home activities didn’t clash.
Made from cheery wood veneer, these elements have a warm tone
As Penthouse BV was originally open-plan, the designers had free rein to draw up a layout that met both of these requirements.
The apartment is also positioned at the centre of a roof terrace, with glazed walls wrapping most of the exterior, so it was easy to create light-filled spaces facing planted terraces.
The joinery is set back from the glazed walls of the penthouse
“The couple wanted to preserve the qualities of living in a house with a garden, so the brief required a spacious, open plan with as much natural light incidence as possible,” said Strojek and Bekkers.
“This request triggered us to locate the circulation space on the perimeter of the penthouse, to strengthen the relation between the inside and the 360-degree private city garden,” they told Dezeen.
The kitchen island has an integrated dining area
The joinery elements not only organise spaces, but also create flexibility. One of the closets integrates a bathroom entrance, while another includes a sliding wall that allows the bedroom and office to become a single space.
Other furniture elements are just as grand in ambition, like the combined kitchen island and dining table, or the full-height hearth that frames the lounge and library areas.
A simple colour scheme brings together shades of grey, brown and beige
The designers chose a sophisticated palette of materials and colours for the interior, with shades of grey, brown and beige. The aim was to provide a “cheerful yet restful environment”.
Apartment on the Belgian coast balances natural and industrial materials
The grey Italian limestone that clads the walls surrounding the terrace was one source of inspiration. Natural stone features throughout the home, with subtle beige tones in the living spaces and a more decorative finish in the bathrooms.
Bathrooms are finished in polished grey limestone
Furnishings bring together classic designs of the past and present, with highlights including an Eames Lounge Chair and the Lumina DOT pendant light by Foster + Partners.
Other details reveal the owners’ tastes. A pair of armchairs in the living room are coloured in a favourite red ochre shade, as are various other objects dotted through the spaces.
A sliding wall allows the bedroom and office to become a single space
“The details are kept simple in aim to reach minimalist objectivity, stripping away the layers of ornaments to create clean perspectives and frame the outside,” added the designers.
Other recent residential projects in Belgium include an apartment on the Belgian coast with seaweed-coloured joinery and a Ghent penthouse organised around three blocks of furniture.
Photography is by Renaat Nijs.
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Studio Anton Hendrik Denys and Steen Architecten have transformed an industrial office building in Belgium by cladding it in corrugated metal and adding colourful graphic interiors.Studio Anton Hendrik Denys, in collaboration with Steen Architecten, stripped the existing office building in Heverlee back to its core and used the company’s corporate identity to create a design that it calls a “contemporary twist on modernism”.
The AEtelier office was designed for an IT consulting company in Belgium and contains a combination of private workspaces, meeting rooms, open plan communal areas, and event rooms that can be used for events and conferences.
Top: AEtelier by Studio Anton Hendrik Denys. Above: walls and the ceiling are painted a deep blue.
“I love and always apply a minimalistic design-language, but simultaneously I feel the need to add something extra,” studio founder Anton Hendrik Denys told Dezeen.
“Modernism often balances minimal shapes wonderfully with splashes of colour and new, unfamiliar materials.”
Wood-panneled areas provide a contrast against the blue walls
Informed by the bold interior colour schemes of the 1960s, the designer chose a deep blue colour for the walls of the office and used teal carpeting and a green floor throughout.
A welcome desk and lockers at the entrance of the office have a muted grey colour palette and are framed by a wood-panelled backdrop, while the blue walls and ceiling create a colourful contrast.
Midcentury-inspired seating areas are built into nooks
An existing dropped ceiling was replaced with circular soundproofing panels that expose the height of the space and its industrial piping and fixtures.
Circular acoustic panels have been added to the ceilings throughout the interior. These are mimicked in large halo lighting fixtures suspended over tables, as well as on cabinetry details that feature circular cut-outs, and have also been added to a wall in a private office.
Colours zone different spaces within the open-plan areas
Denys used colour in an informative way to define different spaces. The orange hue used for the company’s corporate identity was chosen for kitchen areas, bars, toilets and soft furnishings, to make these easy to find.
Studio Aisslinger designs LOQI office with social distancing in mind
“The main colour of my client’s corporate identity happened to be orange, which was both a welcome coincidence and a perfect starting point to build my midcentury-inspired colour palette,” Denys said.
“In the meeting rooms eventually, less bright shades of the main colours were applied to create a more relaxed atmosphere,” he added.
Bars are painted one block colour, so that guests and users can easily navigate the space
A visual language was developed by Jaap Knevel, an information designer, to create iconography and signage so that staff and guests can easily navigate within the space.
The green floor defines shared spaces and guides users through the building. These hard floor surfaces are juxtaposed with a soft teal carpet that covers the floors of private offices and meeting rooms.
Halo lighting fixtures match the circular acoustic panels
Studio Anton Hendrik Denys and Steen Architecten also renovated the exterior of the building, which is now clad in corrugated aluminium that contrasts and frames glimpses of the bold interior that can be seen through the windows.
The aluminium cladding continues into a central landscaped courtyard that houses plants, as well as bright red furniture and a concrete bridge that connects two parts of the office.
A concrete bridge runs through the courtyard between wild landscaping
“For the outdoor renovation, the goal was to create a calm and subtle look that would serve as a frame for the bright interior,” Denys explained.
“Creating a contrast between a silver-ish facade with windows framing shots of blue, orange, green and pink behind them,” he added.
Opal-framed windows and doors sit within the corrugated aluminium facade
“I wanted to move away from the general perception of how office spaces should look like nowadays,” Denys explained.
“Besides that, I wanted to create a space that could be reorganised as time evolves and people might have different needs for their work environment.”
Studio Anton Hendrik Denys was founded by Anton Hendrik Denys, a Belgian-born designer based in Copenhagen who works across art, furniture design, interior and spatial design.
Colourful office interiors are on the rise. Beyond Space recently completed this colourful office designed around a reconfigurable grid system, while Note Studio also created a bold interior that aims to “break the grid” of 1930s office buildings.
Photography is by Hannelore Veelaert.
Project credits:
Designer and creative lead: Studio Anton Hendrik DenysCollaborating architect: Steen ArchitectenLandscape design: Van Dyck Tuinarchitectuur
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A steel staircase offsets seaweed-coloured joinery and marble surfaces inside this Belgian apartment designed by local architects Carmine Van Der Linden and Thomas Geldof.Van Der Linden and Geldof thought using natural materials and colours would reflect the calming coastal location of the two-floor apartment, which is encircled by sand dunes and grassy banks.
The kitchen in the apartment features seaweed-coloured cabinetry
In the apartment’s kitchen, the splashback, shelving and panelled birch-wood cabinets have been stained a murky shade of green.
“The colour choice of the wood subtly brings in the seaweed colour from the adjacent sea and the marram grasses in the surrounding dunes,” said the architects.
The same green stain has been applied across the apartment’s wood-panelled walls
This green hue continues across a handful of wood-lined walls in the apartment and into the guest toilet, which is fitted with a Gris Violet marble basin.
Alga Marina marble has then been used to craft the kitchen countertops and the surface of a central prep table. It’s supported underneath by interlocking silver-metal poles.
The guest toilet includes a marble sink
The architects blanketed the remaining surfaces throughout the apartment in white paint that leaves a clay-like textural finish, in hopes of fostering an “unconscious sense of silence and serenity”.
Dark-grey terrazzo also runs across the floor.
Atelier Dialect places mirrored tub in minty green bathroom of Apartment A
One wall of the living room features a sequence of shelves extending up across both floors of the apartment, offering a spot for the owner to display books or cherished ornaments.
A galvanised-steel staircase connects the apartment’s two floors
The shelves also serve as a backdrop to an open-tread spiral staircase that’s made from galvanised steel. This material was specifically chosen by Van Der Linden and Geldof as they felt it has an almost pearlescent quality.
“With its extremely logical and pragmatic construction method, this object stands as a ‘pièce unique’ in the open living space,” they explained.
Pale white joinery dominates the master bedroom
Panelled joinery, similar to the kitchen, appears again in the master bedroom upstairs, but this time in a whitish colour.
At this level of the apartment, there is also an almost-black sauna room that’s fronted by a panel of glazing, providing views out across the beachy landscape.
The apartment also includes a sauna that has views of the outdoors
This is the first collaborative interiors project from Van Der Linden and Geldof, who are based respectively Ghent and Antwerp.
Other striking Belgian homes include Apartment A by Atelier Dialect, which boasts a mint-green bathroom, and the Spinmolenplein penthouse by architect Jürgen Vandewalle, which is simply arranged around three blocks of furniture.
Photography is by Piet-Albert Goethals.
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Danish design studio Space Copenhagen has used subdued shades of green and grey to deck out the dining room of Le Pristine restaurant in Antwerp, Belgium. Le Pristine, which is headed up by three-Michelin-star chef Sergio Herman, occupies a 1960s modernist building. Years of unfinished renovation works meant that the building’s interior had several patchy
The post Moody interiors of Le Pristine restaurant by Space Copenhagen take cues from the Old Masters appeared first on Dezeen. More
Green walls offset a shiny steel tub in the bathroom of this Antwerp apartment, which has been updated by Belgian design studio Atelier Dialect. The green bathroom is one of a handful of aesthetic changes that Atelier Dialect made to Apartment A. Before the studio’s intervention, the home had already undergone an extensive renovation by […] More
A “bed-cabinet”, kitchen island and boxed-in bathroom help organise the floor plan of the Spinmolenplein penthouse in Ghent designed by Jürgen Vandewalle. The 60-square-metre Spinmolenplein apartment is located on the top floor of the tallest residential building in the Ghent, which rises up 25 storeys. It was erected in the 1970s in an area that […] More
Van Staeyen Interieur Architecten has converted a dark and dusty attic in Antwerp into a living space that features arched portals, curvy furniture and yellow decor accents. The attic – which was previously just used for storage – is set within a young family’s home in Kasterlee, a municipality that’s 45 minutes drive from central […] More
