Thirty years after renovating the maison de maître at Rue St-Georges no. 6, Robbrecht and Daem Architects were asked to collaborate once again with gallery owner Xavier Hufkens. This time, the project involved a substantially new volume that would further raise the gallery’s profile in Brussels and far beyond.

The renovation in the early 1990s was an iconic project for the architectural firm, which they realised in collaboration with Marie-José Van Hee. The result was a razor-sharp dissection of the existing 19th-century mansion, in which, with seemingly few resources, the spaces were opened up into a spatial whole of more intimate rooms full of vistas. Despite the sometimes seamless transition between the existing and new volumes, the extension seeks a gentle contrast in every respect. It consists of a stack of museum-worthy exhibition spaces, monumental rather than intimate, each standing alone in the vertical sequence. Visitors repeatedly leave and enter the exhibition spaces, rather than strolling through the different rooms. Moreover, this monumentality has something very luxurious, iconic and distinct about it.