Interior visit: La Nouvelle Maison by Henry van de Velde in Tervuren – Sat 13 May – 14:45

La Nouvelle Maison in Tervuren, near Brussels, has recently been restored with the utmost care and love under the direction of architect Guido Stegen.

Architect Henry van de Velde himself moved there with his family in 1927. The house reveals refined details and a subtle colour palette, which have been restored to their original state after almost a century.

In his artistic career, van de Velde is a painter, decorator, designer and finally architect. After an Art Nouveau period, around 1900 he opted for a rational design, resulting in the disappearance of decoration, and a blurred distinction between art and artisanship, which would lead to Bauhaus.

La Nouvelle Maison is the fourth and last house that Henry van de Velde (1863-1957) built for his family. All other houses, designed for the van de Velde-Sèthe family, had a different style.

The style of La Nouvelle Maison is clearly modernist, but in Henry van de Velde’s very personal way, with a lot of attention to mass, particularly accentuated by rounded angels, or as Henry van de Velde himself put it: “An architecture reduced to masses, with a dialogue between open and closed surfaces, an architecture anchored in the earth, as if it were born out of it and rising up.

The house is built in the middle of a triangular plot, the eastern part of which served as an orchard, vegetable garden and bleaching meadow, and the western part as an open landscape, overlooking avenue de Tervurenlaan.

Guide: Kjell Keymolen