In March 2026, during TEFAF Maastricht and Collectible Brussels, Zaventem Ateliers will inhabit Villa Empain in Brussels for ten days. This project takes place inside one of Europe’s most significant Art Deco residences.
Villa Empain will not function as an exhibition space. Its original domestic program is reactivated.
Living rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms, and shared spaces are used as such, forming a continuous
lived environment shaped by contemporary collectible design and art.
Thirty one designers and artists from Zaventem Ateliers inhabit the house throughout the project.
They work, eat, rest, and spend time inside the villa. Objects are not presented for observation but
are engaged through daily use, movement, and repetition.
This project brings together two distinct worlds. Villa Empain, conceived in 1934 as a private residence, is defined by proportion, ritual, and material intelligence. Zaventem Ateliers gathers
contemporary practices that are experimental, direct, and rooted in the present.
Rather than inserting objects into a historical setting, Zaventem Ateliers transposes its own shared
habitat of making and living into the villa. The building is not a backdrop but an active participant.
Daily life unfolds inside it, activating the architecture through presence and gesture.
Taking place alongside the international art and design calendar, the project proposes a different
tempo. It favors proximity over spectacle and duration over immediacy.
The encounter between past and present is deliberate and uncompromising. The Art Deco interior is neither softened nor nostalgically reinterpreted. Contemporary works inhabit the space in direct tension with its architectural language. This is not historical revival or period reconstruction.
Images by Tijs Vervecken
Project Statement
Zaventem Ateliers is a family, and also a laboratory. A space where emerging voices find legitimacy, where alternative practices become central, and where design stops being decorative
and becomes radical and fully human.
The world is drifting toward distance. Screens replace hands. Interfaces dilute relationships.
Contact with gesture and material is lost.
In preparing to inhabit Villa Empain, one decision was clear. The intention was not to exhibit objects but to occupy the building and show life.
For a few days this Art Deco jewel becomes a home. The living room, bedroom, and dining room return to life. Cooking, resting, and sharing a meal take place in full view. These daily gestures regain their cultural value.
To occupy a place is a political act. Not one of provocation, but of necessity. It affirms the right to exist fully in the real world with body, hands, and material.
The response to the crisis of the real is incarnation.
Concrete objects charged with soul. Honest materials, recovered, transformed, and used with intention. Presence that is tangible, physical, and
alive.
Villa Empain becomes a prototype of a world where we inhabit spaces instead of passing through them. A world shaped by senses rather than algorithms. A world built around what is essential rather than what is merely represented.
This is a world to live in, not only to imagine.
