Curiosity is a bad habit that sometimes pays off. In Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, anyone who dares to walk through the deliberately open doorway of the mansion at 29 Place de la Duchesse de Brabant will find themselves in a unique and whimsical interior. It’s a world of its own, meticulously crafted by the Brussels-based Notan Office.

It all began with a private developer and a real estate project: to transform an abandoned industrial site into a residential complex. The long, narrow plot was already densely built up. At the front, there was a gently decaying neoclassical mansion overlooking the public square. At the rear, inside the block, were two fragile warehouse halls that only an excess of romanticism could have saved. In order to make the site habitable and let in light, the architects had to work by subtraction. The large warehouses were almost entirely demolished to make way for a tree-lined garden, a sort of hortus conclusus inside the block, bordered by the mansion, which will be preserved and refurbished. Then, two new residential buildings were constructed along the shared boundaries: the first building with three flats, and the second actually housing two single-family homes. Through a simple but clever design, the service areas of each dwelling were relegated to a technical space along the shared boundary, allowing all the living spaces to maximise their view of the communal garden.