Les Hiboux: the façade stayed, the house changed

It was the work of Édouard Pelseneer, born into a family of art trades: his father supplied woodwork to Victor Horta. Pelseneer himself would later design the painter Fernand Khnopff’s house and studio. Here, he chose a rather geometric Art Nouveau, one that plays with materials more than with arabesques.

The façade likes contrasts: red brick, pale stone, colored plasters. The windows open under horseshoe arches, whose curve drops lower than a semicircle, like an arch closing in on itself. The sgraffito is a drawing scratched into layers of plaster in different colors. Arches, flowers and birds echo one another from story to story; nothing is placed there by chance.

The two neighboring houses are older and in a different style. Together, the three façades form a small stretch of street where several eras meet. In the 1980s, the municipality of Saint-Gilles, which needed housing, decided to keep all three and to demolish what stood behind them. The architect Louis Hoebeke built nineteen social apartments and studios there.

This method has a name: facadism. From the sidewalk, the street still shows its old houses. The plans, the volumes, the rooms for which this decor had been designed are gone. Housing was created and a streetscape saved; of the house, only its face was kept.

The owls, for their part, still look out over the avenue from the exact spot where Pelseneer placed them, next to the Maison Hannon.