Horta Museum

From the street the house on Rue Américaine gives only hints: an asymmetric façade, curling ironwork balconies, windows of different shapes set where the rooms behind them need light. Inside, the building opens into one of the defining interiors of Art Nouveau. A staircase of iron and wood climbs through the house beneath a curved skylight of leaded glass, the walls alongside it carry one of the largest sgraffito decorations in Europe, and every detail, from radiators and light fittings to door handles and coat hooks, was drawn by the same hand to follow the same flowing line.

That hand belonged to Victor Horta, the Belgian architect who more than anyone shaped the new style in the 1890s. In 1898 he bought two neighbouring plots in Saint-Gilles and built on them, by 1901, a pair of linked buildings: a private home and a professional studio. They communicate inside yet each keeps its own character, an expression of Horta's wish to separate family life from the workshop. The structure itself becomes ornament: iron, still unusual as a visible material in houses of the time, is left exposed, and the rooms unfold as a tightly arranged sequence of spaces flooded with light from above. Mosaic floors, frescoes, wallpapers and richly carved natural wood complete a total work of art in which nothing is generic.

The house was protected as a monument in 1963 and opened as a museum devoted to Horta and his period on 29 March 1969. Its rooms display furniture, utensils and art objects by Horta and his contemporaries, along with documents about his life and career, among them a table probably designed for the 1902 Turin exhibition of decorative art. In 2000 the house was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with three other Brussels town houses by Horta, the Hôtel Tassel, Hôtel Solvay and Hôtel van Eetvelde, as pioneering works distinguished by open plans, diffused light and the fusion of curving decoration with structure. Saint-Gilles, a municipality just south of the centre of Brussels that grew from a rural village after Brussels became the Belgian capital in 1830, has a dozen or more Art Nouveau houses in its upper part, by Horta, Paul Hankar and others.

Getting there

The museum is at Rue Américaine 23–25 in Saint-Gilles, about 0.9 km from the municipality's centre. The nearest airport is Brussels Airport (BRU), about 12.5 km away in a straight line on the north-eastern side of the city.