Horta Museum

Victor Horta’s own house and studio is now a museum. Here the lines of Art Nouveau flow from banisters to lamps and door handles. A glass-roofed staircase in the middle distributes light through the whole house.

Victor Horta was the leading architect of Brussels Art Nouveau when in 1898 he began building his own house and studio on the Rue Américaine. The house was finished in 1901. He lived here until 1919. It consists of two joined houses: one for the home and one for the studio, each with its own façade on the street. Horta designed everything, down to the smallest detail.

The heart of the house is the staircase, which runs through all the floors beneath a glass roof. Light falls down through the stairwell and spreads to the rooms, which are arranged on split levels around it. The iron is visible and shaped in soft lines in banisters, columns and beams. Wall paintings, mosaics, glass and lamps follow the same movement. Mirrors and glass doors make the rooms flow into one another. The façade is plain by comparison but has balconies and window bays in wrought iron.

The municipality of Saint-Gilles bought the house in 1961, and it opened as a museum in 1969. Since 2000 it has been part of the World Heritage Site of Horta’s major town houses, together with the Hôtel Tassel, Hôtel Solvay and Hôtel van Eetvelde. The house is the best place to experience Horta’s way of making a house into a whole in which structure and decoration cannot be separated.

• Art Nouveau
• Victor Horta