The Belgian design gallery has moved into the Hôtel Danckaert, also known as Villa Dewin, a fine and rare example of a preserved Art Deco building in Brussels. The house was designed in 1922 by the Belgian architect Jean-Baptiste Dewin, for Jean Danckaert, an industrial engineer. The building and the rose garden are listed as heritage sites and the interior furnishings and decoration of the Villa were developed by the famous Ateliers d’Art De Coene.

For the inaugural show, fifteen new pieces by artists and architects of the gallery enter into a dialogue with the building, making it an integrated whole. When you look at the works by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Richard Venlet, Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai, Jonathan Muecke, Sophie Nys, Valérie Mannaerts, Christoph Hefti, Piovenefabi, and Koenraad Dedobbeleer in the interior of the Villa Dewin, you get the feeling they make each other better. It’s like this house needed the pieces to come alive, and vice versa.

A central work in the Hôtel Danckaert’s Salle à Manger (‘dining room’) is a new piece by Lukas Gchwandtner: Lazy Pillows, a comfortable sofa and low table. A large platform in steel, welded by the artist, houses a sofa in off-white painter’s canvas with many integrated pillows filled with lush feathers, and with the seating stitched together with the cushions. As always, Lukas has crafted a made-to-measure dress for his sculptural piece, in silky nylon with hand-cut fringes. Belgian artist Valérie Mannaerts created Little Vessel for the Villa’s imposing staircase hall. The lamp in steel and rope has a theatrical presence. The base of the lamp resembles a knotted cord, and the shade, made out of a continuous rope, creates dramatic shadows.

Ever critical social designer Stéphane Barbier Bouvet developed another Post War Master to illuminate the Villa’s square kitchen table by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen in rough aluminium. Post-War Masters is a series of different works, simultaneously interesting as an application (with an emphasis on connection details), as a form of knowledge (of the history of design, art, and exhibitions), and as a comment (on our relation to the production, dissemination, and circulation of objects). Each piece emulates a different domestic object whose iconic design has come to express high status and good taste today. The pendant is reminiscent of Serge Mouille’s 6 Bras Pivotants. Barbier Bouvet, a defender of an economy of means, produced the “stupidly bended” lamp from basic stainless steel tubes and plates.

The show also introduces pieces by Rooms Studio as a prelude for an upcoming collaboration between the design studio and MANIERA. Rooms is the first female-run studio in Tbilisi, Georgia. Intuitive in its nature, the duo’s working methodology is indirect and fluid. Working primarily on a collection-to-collection basis, with often recurring elements, Nata Janberidze and Keti Toloraia create a continuous, ever-evolving body of work, as if, like the architecture in their motherland, the historical layers are being added on top of one another, without abandoning and closing the previous chapters. Repetition – one of the duo’s characteristics – reminds the viewer of their feminist approach, as well as an Oriental element in Georgia’s culture. In this way, Rooms Studio creates a perfect blend of design, where East and West meet.

One of the most interesting pieces in the exhibition is Historic Bench. Hand-crafted from reclaimed oak, it is created in reference to historic public space objects in Georgia. Designed by an unknown author, benches cast in stone were scattered around the country, mostly at bus stops. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of them were privatized, while others were damaged and destroyed. By transforming an ordinary bench into a different form and material, Rooms Studio conveys a new meaning and definition to something old, forgotten, and unrecognized. It is also an attempt to blur the lines between the public and the private.

The exhibition can be visited until the 6th of May, from Wednesday to Saturday, between 2 pm and 6 pm.