Touching distance: an apartment in a Brussels brutalist block
Can you imagine buying a flat without ever actually stepping inside it? And then doing up the entire place – bashing down walls, jettisoning fittings and reshuffling the floorplan – remotely? For most of us the answer would be an emphatic, “Of course not!”
Kim Verbist would say otherwise. The Belgian interior designer did all of the above when she embarked on the convention-defying transformation of her Brussels apartment, set on the 11th floor of a Brutalist block designed by architect Jacques Wybauw.
Covid played its part. Verbist and her partner, Sofie Van Waeyenberge, were enjoying a break at their weekend cottage on a beach in the Netherlands when lockdown struck. They had just bought the apartment, sealing the deal with a text “sent at midnight”. Previously occupied by a penniless aristocrat, the property had been untouched for decades. With its dark corridors and a damp-ridden bathroom, it was the definitive fixer-upper.
Verbist was unfazed. The couple’s previous city home, a few blocks down the road, had been designed by the same architect. “I know how his structures work; which walls I could knock down. I knew the materials would be sound,” she says. Her secondary school was also by Wybauw. In a city better known for its sinuous art-nouveau townhouses, the teenage Verbist learned to appreciate then-unfashionable 1970s architecture. “The light… the way the spaces flowed. His design is in my DNA.”
It also helped that before setting up her own practice specialising in retail and residential properties, Verbist worked for several large hotel chains. That experience, of tempering creativity to fit budgets and space, is evident here. The apartment is compact, but like a luxurious hotel suite, it has everything you need. The central living, cooking and dining area – “We spend hours talking over meals” – is flanked by two bedrooms, one of which doubles as a study and guest room for Verbist’s daughter. There are also two bathrooms and hidden a utility room.
The catalyst for the tutti-frutti colour scheme was a kelim rug. Hauled home from a trip to Istanbul 30 years ago, it has travelled with the couple from home to home ever since. “The dogs have eaten bits of it. But that doesn’t matter,” says Verbist. Counterintuitively, painting the rooms different colours – Tuscan pink, emerald green, cocoa brown – makes the space feel larger. It is even more impressive when you remember that this was all done remotely, Verbist’s customary early-morning site visits carried out on WhatsApp and Zoom.
But even professionals have wobbly moments. The first time she saw the apartment was the day the decorators whisked off the dust sheets to unveil the finished project. “I looked at the terracotta walls and thought: this is horrible. We’ll have to put our boxes in the middle of the room and start again.” A mildly cross Van Waeyenberge urged patience. She was right. “Once we’d unpacked everything it all came together as I’d imagined it would.”
Moving from a larger home they cherrypicked favourite furnishings and possessions. “We started in a large townhouse and have been downsizing ever since. Which is the opposite of what most people do. But I like the process of refining your belongings.”
The majestic, veneer-clad 1950s TV came from Van Waeyenberge’s grandparents’ appliance shop. The glazed white cabinet, eerily scented with pharmaceutical aromas, began life in a doctor’s practice and houses their collection of pottery. In the guest room, a bedside table is made from a fallen ash tree from Verbist’s father’s country garden on the border with France. Aset of graphic midcentury Polish film posters was a present from a friend, whose father was a diplomat in Cold War Warsaw. Everything captures her precise aesthetic: “I like colour, reusing things, minimal plastic – and not too many designer pieces.”
Half-walls zone the living space. The reading nook was designed to fit the twin sofas recovered in a deep blue velvet; mirrored shelving glimmers by night. Opposite, the kitchen cabinets are from Ikea, a curvy island, made to fit, houses more storage. Underfoot, she swapped floor tiles for warmer parquet, inspired by the original flooring. Next to this, a deep window ledge and stools double as a bar for breakfast with a southerly view. In winter, the dogs bask in the warmth of underfloor heating.
There is more ingenuity in the main bedroom. A shower room is lined in one-way glass next to a neat dressing area. The bed floats on a podium (built to conceal pipework), the dramatic flourish echoed in the carpet. Woven with lush flowers lifted from a Dutch old master, it creeps up the wall like a fluffy mural. Friends are divided about this defiantly un-Belgian 1970s touch. But, like everything else in this norm-spurning home, it works.
