Hasta La Ideas

Belgian studio Notan Office has completed Duchesse, a series of homes positioned around a communal garden on an old industrial site in Brussels.

Commissioned to create two houses and six apartments, Notan Office designed the complex to create the feeling of being in a small village or “micro-city”.

Duchesse’s design also aims to preserve the site’s historic significance by retaining existing elements while revamping others with new tiled volumes.

“Since the site was almost entirely built before our intervention, we adopted a subtractive approach rather than construction,” studio founder Frédéric Karam told Dezeen.

“[This] led us to generate three distinct volumes, giving rise to the concept of a ‘micro-city’,” he continued.

The site, which faces an active public square, is home to a range of historic buildings and structures, including a typical late-1800s Brussels townhouse and a long industrial hall overlooking a shared courtyard.

Notan Office’s intervention saw the renovation of the townhouse and the addition of two new volumes – one behind the hall’s brick facade and another to the rear of the site.

The volume positioned behind the existing brick facade is clad in crystalline white tiles and its form is reminiscent of the industrial hall it replaces. The second volume is clad in contrasting crimson tiles and features angled sawtooth roofs.

“The vertically placed red tiles resonate with the existing bricks of the walls and facade, forging a connection with the site’s history,” said Karam.

“Simultaneously, the white tiles complement the painted existing brick walls, establishing a dialogue between the old and the new,” he continued.

To reinforce the feeling of a “micro-city”, the studio designed several housing typologies of differing sizes to cater to various lifestyles. The townhouse and white building contain apartments, while the red building is split into two houses.

On entering the buildings, the ground floors are dedicated to shared activities and community spaces such as bicycle parking, an atelier and a communal garden.

Both internally and externally, materials and elements previously present on the site have been reused and reinterpreted, such as the doors to the apartments and a winding outdoor staircase.

Contemporary mint green metalwork on the windows, railings and steel beams sit comfortably alongside the historic features. These sensitive combinations of the old and the new help to respect the identity of the site.

“The site exuded a sense of a microcosm, thanks to its industrial history and features,” Karam explained.

“We aimed to preserve and intensify this feeling by integrating and reinterpreting existing architectural archetypes, such as the outdoor staircase, annexe, industrial facade and curvy walls while respecting the site’s architectural vocabulary,” he continued.

Notan Office is a Brussels studio founded in 2014 by Karam. Elsewhere in Brussels, it created a roof extension with an Alvar Aalto-informed fireplace.

Other multi-unit residential projects featured on Dezeen include a multi-generational housing scheme in Erfut by Dorschner Kahl Architects and Heine Mildner Architects and a grey-brick courtyard housing block in London by Sergison Bates Architects.

The photography is by Stijn Bollart.

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