Schoonbroodt House

• Date 1973-1974, 1983
• Address Lommerichergasse, 4 – 4700 Eupen

The design for the Schoonbroodt family’s home reflects the social circles in which Charles Vandenhove moved. Close to cultural and intellectual circles, the architect and his wife Jeanne were discerning music lovers. It was therefore through personal friendships that Hubert Schoonbroodt, organ professor at the Royal Conservatoire of Liège, came to commission Vandenhove.

The house is situated on the outskirts of Eupen, in a peaceful, leafy neighbourhood. The architect’s proposed layout breaks with the conventional arrangement of having the living areas on the ground floor and the bedrooms upstairs. Within a large rectangle of precise dimensions – 8.4 metres wide and exactly twice that in length – Vandenhove has combined a large living/dining room, a kitchen, the master bedroom and a child’s bedroom, all directly connected to the bathroom. A garage and a storage room complete the ground floor. Accessible via a wooden spiral staircase, the mezzanine houses two bedrooms and a bathroom. Facing south-west, the living areas look out onto the garden and are generously lit by a monumental floor-to-ceiling window that spans the entire façade.

With the Schoonbroodt house, Vandenhove experimented with the ‘mass-producible house’ (a similar house was being built at the same time for the Delforge family in Beez, near Namur) and favoured an approach centred on prefabricated elements, constructing the façades from architectural concrete panels combined with wooden frames. As for the gable roof, it rests on a steel framework whose outer beams echo the tubular design already employed by the architect in several projects. Similarly, as with the Schoffeniels House, the entrance hall is preceded by a canopy comprising four Plexiglas sky-domes. The exterior design of the house, meanwhile, marks a more explicit affirmation of the column as both a structural and formal element. Like an ancient temple, the house is surrounded by a peristyle of concrete columns.

Ten years later, Charles Vandenhove was involved in the extension of the house, adding a music pavilion linked to the main building by a glazed gallery. Topped by a pyramidal roof, the extension features a mezzanine accessible via a straight staircase supported by black marble columns. As in many of his projects, the architect designed several pieces of furniture, such as the bookcase and the organ installed in the music pavilion.

In 1992, Vandenhove was commissioned one last time by the family to create the memorial erected in honour of the organist in Eupen cemetery.

• Description of the collection

  Full plans, sketches, various letters, award certificates, a collection of photographs…

• Volumetry 3 boites (0.48 m)
• Bibliography

  COQ, Maxime, « Un nouvel ordre classique… et (post-)moderne : rhétorique de la colonne dans l’œuvre de Charles Vandenhove » in Bulletin de la Commission royale des Monuments, Sites et Fouilles, t. 32, 2019, p. 156-157.

• AUTHOR AND DATE OF THE ENTRY Sébastien Charlier, 2021