Immeuble à appartements et maisons Art déco, Mechelsesteenweg 119-121 — Anvers

Group of an apartment building and six single-family houses in the Art Deco style, built for the Mutuelle Immobilière Anversoise company to 1934 designs by the architect Jan De Vroey, author of the apartment building, and his son, the engineer-architect Léon De Vroey, author of the houses; judging by Léon De Vroey's façade stone on the apartment building, he completed the group; Jan De Vroey died in 1935. The apartment building on the corner with the Molenweg, of two by four bays, has a basement and six storeys under a flat roof for six high-standing flats; it incorporates the foundations, plinth, outer walls and floor slabs of a mansion of the second half of the 19th century, reinforced by a reinforced-concrete structure, and is the counterpart of the building erected in 1930 across the Molenweg to a design by the same Jan De Vroey. Its façades, rendered in imitation stone, with bluestone for the plinth and surrounds, are dominated by a taller side projection with a rising three-sided bay window; only the typical Art Deco cellar grilles survive, the wrought-iron door having been remade after the original pattern and the windows renewed. The six houses, of two storeys under a flat roof, form a symmetrical group paired in mirror image, in red brick with a bluestone plinth and areas of render, punctuated by narrow, paired, taller entrance projections with a stepped Art Deco crowning, beneath broad overhanging cornices; the original wooden front doors survive only at nos. 119/2, 119/5 and 119/6. The group is recorded in the Flemish architectural heritage inventory.

Translated from the French original.