Villa Florent Verbeeck — Zele

Villa in the Art Deco style, known as the Villa Florent Verbeeck, built in 1923 as a residence with workshops for the industrialist Florent Verbeeck to designs by the Brussels architect Jean-Baptiste Dewin; it adjoined the owner's wood-turning works, the "Tournerie Industrielle", since demolished. Detached and raised above street level in a walled garden, it is conceived as a double-fronted house of four bays and one storey over a basement, with a full upper floor within intersecting mansard roofs covered in slate-tiles; its composition plays on stepped volumes, the left-hand window projection ending in a broken gable. The red brickwork is enlivened by natural stone (plinths, cellar windows, entablature, corbels, gable copings) and by two remade sgraffito panels depicting an owl and three squirrels. The porch shelters a double door with a glazed transom under a wooden canopy on two paired baluster-shaped brackets, a stylised motif repeated in the modillion cornice and the original window joinery, with small panes and coloured textured glass in the transoms. The interior retains its original plan, organised around a square stair hall lit by stepped rectangular windows in the left-hand side elevation. The villa is recorded in the Flemish architectural heritage inventory.

Translated from the French original.