Hôtel Van Loo, De Merodelei 8 — Anvers

Town house in the Art Deco style built for Mrs R. Van Loo after a 1935 design by the architect Jan Jacobs; the works, entrusted to the firm Gebroeders Stevens of Merksem, were completed in 1936. According to the inventory, its architecture still belongs to the matter-of-fact Art Deco that Jacobs had developed in the 1920s, and it is comparable to the Résidence La France (1926) and the office building of the Compagnie Nationale d'Éclairage (1929). Four bays wide, it comprises a main wing of two storeys over a basement and a taller service wing of four storeys, including a mezzanine, under flat roofs; the street front is faced with white stone in large blocks on a bluestone plinth. The asymmetrical composition, in shallow relief and with sober detailing, balances the central entrance, the three-sided bay window of the breakfast room and the projection of the service wing with its garage door; the wide windows with rounded surrounds keep their steel frames. Oculi and the chevron-shaped central mullion of the entrance decorated with a palmette, a motif repeated in the Art Deco ironwork of the front door, garage door, balustrades and grilles, are typical details, and the interior is almost intact. The house is recorded in the Flemish architectural heritage inventory.

Translated from the French original.