Portrait of a House by Frederik Vercruysse

Aaaaand – we’re back! Happy New Year dearest readers. I’ll have you know that I spend a lot of time thinking about and choosing the right post to kick of each year. This could be said for all of our posts, but the first one has to be ultra special, as I’m looking for something that sets the right tone for the year ahead.

I thought that this stunning collaboration between Belgian photographer Frederik Vercruysse and Buyse Seghers Architects titled ‘Portrait of a House’ is a perfect fit – beautiful and inspiring; gentle, subtle, yet incredibly powerful. In fact, I find myself feeling deeply moved and quite emotional looking at these images. I also love how they make me experience architecture and interiors in a completely new way. (It also reminds me of a very fun post written by our friends some time ago which asks this question – Can a House be a Character?)

‘Portrait of a House’ by Frederik Vercruysse is a pure and a theatrical documentation of the home designed by Buyse Seghers Architects. The sublime interiors with it’s sage walls, wide oak floorboards, snow white backdrops and red marble kitchen is a perfect milieu for this carefully orchestrated play. Time and place are irrelevant in this dreamscape.

The photographer describes his work as still life photography in the broad sense of the word. Approaching architecture and interior photography from the same angle, Vercruysse sees furnished spaces as compositions, and his aim is to photograph the subject in its purest form – sometimes realistic, often minimalistic, both object compositions and even portrait photography.

When two architects Bram Seghers and Inge Buyse, founding partners of Buyse Seghers Architects, stumbled upon a derelict manor house amidst an overgrown victorian garden, it was love at first sight. The couple acquired the abandoned ruin of a once-grand 17th-century house, to renovate and to live in with their two sons.

Determined to restore the house to it’s former glory but also ensure it’s future existence, Buyse Seghers developed a multi-functional plan enabling different layouts and uses in time. Even though the building now looks like one coherent structure, the house evolution spans three-centuries (17th to 20thC) with visible and layered marks of the exterior brickwork. True to the past, they adapted the house to it’s specific needs, re-interpreting the old rather than bringing in the new. Once again the house has found a new coherency as if nothing ever changed.