Tright here is each stillness and motion in Caroline de Wolf’s Belgian house. Its defining characteristic is the monumental staircase, based mostly on the central spiral ramp in New York’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Impressed by their love of the visionary American architect, De Wolf and her husband, engineer-turned-designer Joris Van Apers, constructed the home in Duffel, simply south of Antwerp, in 2000. It was designed by Van Apers, who was working as an engineer on the time. He now runs the household enterprise, Joris Van Apers BV, which is each a design studio and a provider of reclaimed wooden. De Wolf is the CFO. The couple’s ardour for wooden, and for nature, is a unifying characteristic of an area ruled by architectural circulation.
“The completely different rhythms of the home observe the rhythm of the staircase,” says De Wolf. Rising via all three ranges of the home, the spiral building is fabricated from a mix of plaster and laborious micro-cement. The treads are pine. “All ranges and rooms result in the staircase, just like the branches of a tree to their trunk.”
“We wished a home with open areas that linked with nature and plenty of gentle, however we additionally wished heat and intimacy,” says De Wolf of the 5,400sqft three-bedroom house. A combination of supplies, together with a spread of reclaimed woods, slate tiles reclaimed from a monastery, and lime-finished partitions, present heat hues in addition to texture.
In the lounge, the dynamic interaction of colors that characterise Paul Klee’s work was the start line. The vivid pink of paired shelving is picked up in De Wolf’s favorite artworks, two summary work by Belgian artist Michel Mouffe put in over the slate hearth.
A Murano glass desk lamp, golden curtains and panelled ceiling offset lime-washed teal partitions and the 2 inviting Nineteen Thirties blue lounge chairs – by Czech designer Jindrich Halabala – collect round one other standout piece, the espresso desk by the Belgian artist and designer Ado Chale.
This can be a house for shifting between areas and enjoyable, however look up and also you see not solely the reclaimed pine-beamed ceiling, impressed by New York’s Gramercy Park Hotel, but additionally the railings of the health centre at half-level, utilized by the couple’s two daughters, 17 and 14. A passerelle, or bridge, designed so as to add depth and geometry, connects the health space to the ladies’ bedrooms. There’s additionally a pool within the backyard, heated year-round for every day swimming and, in the primary bed room up within the eaves, a scorching tub is hid beneath a deep, pine window seat.
Raise the pine seat, climb in and, “with the home windows open, it creates the sensation of being outdoors within the bathtub, and a powerful connection to nature,” says De Wolf. “When the recent tub is closed you possibly can sit, calm down, learn or meditate on the window sill.”
Versatile and housing hid storage, these resting quarters (“bed room” doesn’t do the house justice) are each purposeful and calming. A tv is hidden inside a nutwood trunk on the foot of the mattress and there’s a dressing room behind double pine doorways. “We had been in search of intimacy and a spot to calm down,” says De Wolf, “a bed room not only for sleeping, but additionally for tranquillity and peace.” The recent tub, she says, reveals off her husbands’s “playfulness”, in addition to his fondness for “secret, shocking locations”.
In each the primary bed room and toilet the wealthy grains of wooden and the usage of textured cloth counter the virtually ascetic really feel created by the lime-washed partitions, metal home windows and steel-framed glass partitioning. There’s one thing monastic – and stylish – about it. In actual fact, the time period “boutique monastic” could possibly be coined only for this home.
Within the bed room, the pine floorboards had been blackened by a course of just like shou sugi ban, the Japanese strategy of burning wooden. Within the rest room, York stone tiles on the ground complement an vintage Italian nutwood counter salvaged from an outdated financial institution, and customised ceramic basins.
“We love the tactility, the construction of wooden, and the truth that it’s a pure materials,” says De Wolf.
It’s downstairs within the dwelling and eating space that the household spend most of their time. “That is the place we calm down collectively as a household,” says De Wolf. “The large oak desk, designed and made by Joris, is used as a piece desk and as a eating desk.”
The tiles on the kitchen island, additionally designed by Van Apers – as had been so many options of the home – had been handmade by a French ceramicist named Regula Brotbek. In attribute consideration to element, the sample was impressed by a vase Brotbek designed for Van Apers’s mom. The slate worktop was made within the firm’s studio.
The kitchen appears out on to the backyard on three sides. “We love the contact with nature once we are sitting right here,” says De Wolf. “We drink our espresso and browse the papers right here, and at all times eat right here as a household.”
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