Reiken III (licht, zicht, anti-dicht)

A townhouse in Brussels, on the edge of the city centre, in a calm street where the honking cars unexpectedly make room for people and families. The house used to be a doctor’s house, with a practice downstairs and the living area upstairs. An old carriage passage took you through a half round gate, through the house, towards the back yard. But, as so often happens, grandeur gradually made way for functionality. The carriage passage was closed up and an annex building was built against it, with a dark, closed room and an outdoor toilet.
The house is situated in a building block with high density and has, partly thanks to the annex building, little functional outdoor space.

The new family of five is of a new era. Above all they are not looking for more built space, but more breathing space; light, sight, tight. More Void, less mass. We decide to start hollowing things out together. We pit the outdoor space and the house, and we make sure that every room in the house is one to really want and be able to hang about. When you look for light in the city, you don’t look sideways, you look up. So we wake up the house from its hibernation and dig ourselves a way up; through floor packages, through carpets, through old layers of paint, until we have made a chain of voids, starting downstairs, all the way up, through the roof. The new life in the house reaches for the sky. It stacks activities on top of each other and interconnects them. An office space, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor; connected through a void with the living space on the first floor. The living space looks up to the second floor, through the dusky glass of the dressing, where the sun shines through the skylights and the children play in the oversized hallway. And through the biggest skylight finally, a new staircase leads us to the big roof, where a allotment and roof terrace permanently grant us access to light, fresh air, and a view of the neighbourhood tree tops. There are views all around the house; through walls, doors, cupboards, ceilings, giving you a glimpse of what is behind. What was closed now breathes through void.

A renovation of an old building never starts from scratch, and that is what makes it so special. You get a palimpsest thrown in your lap; a building like a sheet of paper that has been written on multiple times by previous users; rewritten, some parts erased, other parts added, but the original sheet of paper has always remained below the text. In this renovation as well we examine what is the sheet, and what is the writing. We remove what doesn’t belong to the original house (the bricked up rear façade with annex building, the outdated kitchen and bathrooms,…) and only add things that are clearly new, but reinforce the original building. Light now falls deep into the house on the original interior doors, boarded floors and stairs. Throughout the house new joinery in the same style brings order and readability: cupboards, balustrades along voids and a staircase to the clouds. The rear façade gets a facelift; it is now a full-fledged façade along the new garden. The rear façade imitates the front façade in a contemporary way. Brick imitates plinths, windowsills and frame gutters. Like a little brother, wanting to learn from his big brother, but adding something himself.

The old carriage passage is open again now, a robust tiled strip leading from the front door to the garden, through the kitchen. A new house, reaching for the sky, inside and outside, ready to allow a new life.