Hôtel-casino de la verrerie — Mol

The 'Casino' was built as a factory hotel to lodge the many skilled Walloon workers of the glassworks of the Compagnie Internationale pour la Fabrication Mécanique de Verre (F.M.V.) at Mol-Gompel, and as a private club for the management and senior staff; it soon became the centre of the workers' estate's community life. Its plans, dated 1925, are by the architect Louis Sauvage, and the Art Deco building was entered in the cadastre in 1926; on the axis of Barcelonalei, it faces the glassworks' original office building. This symmetrical brick building, over cellars, with a raised ground floor and two storeys under half-mansard and gabled roofs of machine-made tiles, has a strongly decorative front block of seven bays: tower-like corner bays with broken gables and rusticated corner pilaster strips under open hipped roofs, abundant geometric and chequerboard patterns in yellow brick, and a central bay with a small curved gable and a polygonal oeil-de-boeuf above a heavy stone bearing the monogram FMV. Inside, a spacious hall leads to the Art Deco festival hall under an iron-and-glass dome, with a sunken dance floor, surviving parquet and a stage; the building was empty and its interior neglected at the time of the inventory (2009-2010). The building has been protected as a monument since 2010.

Translated from the French original.