Maisons jumelées Art déco, Elisabeth Willemslaan 23-25 — Haacht

Two identical Art Deco town houses, joined as mirror images, entered in the land registry in 1935 and built for the couples Janssens-De Keuster (no. 25) and Van der Straeten-De Keuster (no. 23), the wives being sisters. They are among the oldest buildings in the Elisabeth Willemslaan in Wespelaar, a street laid out in the 1930s on land ceded to the municipality by Viscount de Spoelberch, where some twenty Art Deco houses were built before 1939. Under a continuous hipped roof with strongly projecting wooden eaves, each house has two bays and two storeys, in brown brick alternating with white rendered surfaces on a blue stone plinth. The window bay, vertical and ending in a broken gable, carries on the ground floor a white rendered trapezoidal oriel with cellar openings with Art Deco grilles, then a balcony with an openwork wrought-iron parapet and an oval attic window; the original door, with hammered glass and Art Deco decoration, opens at the back of a porch in the outer bay, beneath an Art Deco leaded fanlight. No. 23 keeps all its wooden joinery with Art Deco fanlights, no. 25 only the fanlights; the gardens are enclosed by a low Art Deco railing on a brick base, and the original garages survive. The houses are recorded in the Flemish architectural heritage inventory.

Translated from the French original.