Lighter than Light: A Country Villa by Grain Designoffice.

If there’s one thing that defines—and unites—spaces by Grain Designoffice, it’s an enduring sense of weightlessness. Walls the colour of sunlight. Furniture in amorphous shapes. Rooms that flow into each other like slow, meandering rivers. No different is the Belgian design studio’s latest project, a country villa in Antwerp, which goes check, check, check on all the aforementioned criteria.

A couple of years ago, however, this description wouldn’t have been quite so accurate. “The interior was completely gutted,” recalls Sander Bullynck, one-half of the Belgian architecture and design studio.

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For him and the firm’s other half, Nick De Moor, the stripped-back state wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It gave them a chance to start afresh and keep no risks off the table. Not even the boldest-of-bold palettes, which they attempted in the dining room, in the way of a Stygian table and plum chairs.

They also dared to go big with contrasts, offsetting the existing architecture with a quirky and sophisticated mix of colours, textures, furnishings and materials, until, as the architects put it, “it revealed itself as a sexy kernel in a classic husk.”

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Some things that did the trick? Pairing Pietra di Medici natural stone with American walnut and classic onyx, juxtaposing lacquered cabinet doors with brass objects and soft upholstery, and using a combination of organic and straight lines.

As far as spaces went, Sander and Nick put the dead space to good use, carving out a state-of-the-art dressing room, a generous wine room, a cinema room, a gym and a sauna. Outside, they even installed a pool house, to balance the scales on either side of the threshold. Weightless would be right.

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[Images courtesy of Grain Designoffice. Photography by Piet Albert Goethals.]