The two friends had thought the project – to restore the Brussels townhouse designed by Belgian architect Victor Horta – would take two, maybe three years at most. In fact, it took eight. One of the most time-consuming factors was dealing with the public authorities who were financing the plan.

“They wanted certainty about the materials, the craftsmen, the experts,” recalls Schuiten, a graphic artist. “At times it was disheartening because we weren’t making any progress. But it was great fun, too, discovering the quality of the building.”

In the end, their perseverance paid off. In December of 2004, they opened the house as a museum. As well as showing off Horta’s townhouse itself, the museum is also home to many temporary exhibitions, with photographs, prints, paintings or objects displayed throughout.

Built in 1893, the building, situated at 266 Haachtsesteenweg in the Brussels commune of Schaarbeek, marks a transition from Horta’s early Classicism to the Art Nouveau style. Not as luxurious or extravagant as the better-known Horta House or Hôtel Solvay, the building nonetheless has many of the flourishes and characteristics associated with his later style.

The entry hall is the highlight, with its mosaic flooring in an off-white colour and Horta’s characteristic swirls of the coup de fouet (whiplash) design in orange-brown. The wooden staircase seems to grow out of the flooring, its curved lower steps and sculpted banister evoking a plant or other motif from nature.

To top this off, as you look up the stairs to the next floor you see a beautiful stained-glass feature on part of the wall and ceiling that recalls the larger, more extravagant winter gardens found in the middle rooms of other Horta houses. The hallway also boasts an original mirror and mantelpiece, forming a unit together with the simple white radiator underneath.

The restoration of the house inevitably entailed many difficult decisions, such as which colours and materials should be used. Over the decades, the building has acquired different styles and elements, so decisions had to be taken as to which of these should be preserved. Some of the choices, which were always made after a lot of research and much reflection, may be surprising, Schuiten and Peeters say in their book Maison Autrique: Metamorphosis of an Art Nouveau House. They cast a new light on some “received ideas” about the architecture of Victor Horta.

The two men were keen for the house to come to life and turned each room into a stage set, with an event linked to its use. For example, in the large bedroom on the first floor a black dress is laid out on the bed, as if ready to be worn that evening. Down in the basement, the kitchen table is covered with cooking utensils and weighing scales, and the stove has a couple of pans on it as if the evening meal were being prepared. The laundry in the room next door is filled with white sheets and clothes, and the wine cellar is stocked with (empty!) bottles.

As Schuiten and Peeters say, it was “a wonderful opportunity to realise one of our dreams: stage-manage a Brussels House from cellar to loft.”

For the museum’s opening, Louis Vuitton also contributed to this sense of theatricality by providing trunks with the well-known LV design for the rooms. This detail is captured in a drawing of the Autrique House done by Schuiten, which is hanging up behind the museum’s entrance desk. As well as drawings of the house, Schuiten has also done illustrations of its architectural features that have been used in the Robert French-language dictionary to illustrate the words bel etage ("piano nobile") and rejointayage (“pointing”).

The restoration of the house and its transformation into a museum took over the lives of Schuiten and Peteers for many years, and to this day the two of them remain very involved. “It’s like a child…you have to follow it, watch it grow up,” says Schuiten, who still lives in the area.

When I ask him if he would take on such a project again, the artist emphasises that it was something special and unique, rediscovering a piece of local heritage. “It involved a considerable investment and was, above all, a civic project. You can’t always do that kind of work.”

www.autrique.be

Comic Connection

François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters’ passion for Victor Horta’s architecture can be traced back at least to their well-known comic book series Cities of the Fantastic, which they started in 1983. The architecture in the first book of the series evokes an Art Nouveau style and some of the original boards were in fact exhibited at the Horta House in Brussels.

The duo’s associations with the world of comics helps explain the subject of the temporary exhibition showing at the Autrique House until 25 April: Births of the Comic Strip. The exhibition, accompanied by a book of the same title, traces the comic strip from what professor Thierry Smolderen argues are its origins in the 18th century through to the early 20th century.

As of early June, the Autrique House plans to have a show for the summer months that focuses on the house itself, putting on display drawings, paintings and photographs of the house, including some works by Schuiten.

DIY

It seems that citizens who want to see the great treasures of Art Nouveau restored in Brussels give up on the city’s involvement and do it themselves. Besides the restoration of the Autrique House, another family has spent six years restoring the Albert Ciamberlani mansion on Defacqzstraat in Elsene. Ciamberlani commissioned architect Paul Hankar, a colleague of Victor Horta, to build it in 1897, and it has now been restored to its former glory by its new owners after decades of decay.