Refuge by Wim Goes Architectuur // House Extension in Belgium.

Perhaps it was too much Tintin as a child, or too fond a love of Brussels Sprouts, but I have always nursed a soft spot for Belgium. Jacques Brel’s ‘Le Plat Pays’, and the setting for several lovely holidays in years past.

I love the remorselessly flat horizon pierced by distant belforts and spires, the bricky little towns, the lush foliage of green upon green in cities and in the fields. I even like the iron grey mist of drizzle that my Belgian friends deride, but which I love as it lets me know I’m there. And I’m told they have the more public holidays than most other nations and then there’s all that beer and chocolate… What a great place!

In a small town outside of Ghent, lies this interesting little extension by Wim Goes Architectuur. It was completed in 2008, but I think good things deserve a revisit. These images come from Wim Goes Architectuur’s website and were taken by Kristien Daem and Laura Bown.

The building is a living room extension to an existing brick house. It captures many lovely components of the architecture of the region – unitised construction (here it is timber rather than the omnipresent brick of Flanders), modest scale, simple form, and water – many moated little chateaux and farmhouses are strewn around the countryside. Wouldn’t you love to sit on the end of this and dip your toes in the pond while someone passes you a waffle?

Wonderful jugglers of brick, the Belgians. Wonderful! Oh for a front porch so serene.

The interior is a simple timbered hall with a big iron hearth. What more does one need? Apart from delicious chocolate? The architect’s statement for this extension describes it as ‘… a link between landscape and architecture, (which) at the same time does not try to be one more than the other or anything new’. It’s easy to see the realisation of this intent here. How happily the vertical timbers of the windows and walls sit amidst the tree trunks all around… sigh.