Villa Zeegers-Dumon

Designed by Tijl Vanmeirhaeghe in collaboration with Carl Bourgeois, the two-storey brick pavilion in the village of Destelbergen is home to a couple with four children. The building organises the well- known domestic programme of the family house, one that is here extended by a room devoted to the wife’s online retail business. It is not the design that defines the domestic programme, however, but the simple geometry of the rooms. Some are completely enclosed, others form sequences: an enfilade of kitchen, dining and music rooms on the ground floor, as well as a spacious hall that is vaguely reminiscent of Venetian porteghi. This is all built in the simple vocabulary of standardised wooden construction, as evidenced in the ceiling pattern of closely spaced beams that lends a sense of gentle monumentality to the domestic interiors.

The design uses the principles of geometry to establish rooms that are only loosely attributed to function. They derive their characteristics from their dimensions, from their orientation and from their views into the garden and across the manicured Flemish landscape. The wooden construction, beams and boards all provide ample evidence of how the building has been put together. At the same time, it evokes the general atmosphere of a simple and well-crafted interior set within the substantial walls of a dark brick façade.

Author: Christoph Grafe. TThis text has been published in the Architecture Review Flanders N°11. Embedded Architecture.