Pieter De Bruyne’s Last Work Receives Landmark Status

From the street, the Van Schuylenbergh House in Aalst, Belgium, looks quite anonymous. Except for an aqua garage door and a pavement-to-roof ribbon of indigo glass incorporating the front door, the white-painted brick facade doesn’t stand out. Only upon entering does it become clear why this apparently modest, three-story residence has recently been landmarked.

Built between 1979 and 1986, the town house is a postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk, the masterpiece of Belgian designer Pieter De Bruyne, who died of kidney disease at the early age of 56, a year after its completion. Except among a handful of connoisseurs, De Bruyne’s name doesn’t ring many bells today. His 175 interiors are hardly known; few have been preserved. None of his more than 200 furnishings and objects are still in production, not even his three lamps for Arteluce and two for Stilnovo. “There are no plans for reeditions either,” says Stoffel Van Schuylenbergh, whose parents commissioned the house, in which he grew up and his mother still lives. “Almost all De Bruyne’s furniture was made by his father’s woodwork atelier, and never in editions of more than 10. Because of bad experiences with the industry, he didn’t want to work with big foreign manufacturers.”

Artist Lucas Van Schuylenbergh, Stoffel Van Schuylenbergh’s late father, met De Bruyne, a graduate of Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussels, at an exhibition in the ’60’s. The two men became friends, and the artist began to collect the designer’s work. “When my father had about eight pieces, he decided to have De Bruyne create a house around the collection,” the son continues. “Only trained as an interior designer, De Bruyne was obliged to work with local architect Achiel Hutsebaut, who was much more traditional.” Nevertheless, for the first time De Bruyne was able to conceive a building in which architecture and furniture blend seamlessly. “The house is still 95 percent original,” Van Schuylenbergh says. “As a child, I did realize that we were living in something special, something completely different from the houses of my school friends.”

Bathed in blue window light, the compact raw-concrete and painted-brick entry hall leads directly to the living-dining area, which sits under a steel-and-glass pyramid skylight. (In fact, only one half of a pyramid; De Bruyne used mirrors to make it appear complete.) “The house is a stack of geometric shapes, which also recur in his furniture: squares, circles, rectangles, and triangles,” Van Schuylenbergh notes. The designer was fascinated by the forms and proportions of the architecture and furniture of ancient cultures, including the Mayan, the Indian, and, most importantly, the Egyptian. He made many trips to Cairo’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities to take precise measurements of the furniture there, including a Tutankhamun cabinet. “My research tells me that the Egyptians are the founders of both the grammar and the typology of furniture,” De Bruyne said in a 1984 interview.

But mostly through the next decade he pioneered a rigorous, uncompromising version of what came to be called postmodernism. At the end of the ’70’s he received invitations to to collaborate with Studio Alchimia and Memphis Group, the nascent superstars of the iconoclastic movement, which could have led to his international breakthrough. De Bruyne did not accept. He found them “too superficial and playful,” and thought of their frivolous creations as “forms without content.” Ironically, his groundbreaking Chantilly cabinet—a 1975 piece based on the meticulous measurement and analysis of of an 18th-century French bureau desk in the Musée Condé in France—was the highlight of “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990,” a major exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2011. The landmarking of the Van Schuylenbergh House may be another sign that De Bruyne’s recognition quotient is finally on the rise.

George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg Earn a Best of Year Award for This Chic Parisian Store

2021 Best of Year winner for Large Retail

A complex of fin de siècle, art nouveau, and art deco buildings, the last completed in 1928, La Samaritaine, a once-fabled department store in the first arrondissement, has reopened 16 years after shuttering. The multifirm renovation of the entire property includes a hotel by Peter Marino Architect, a new building by SANAA, and Interior Design Hall of Fame members George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg’s redesign of 11,350 square feet of retail space in the landmarked art nouveau structure. Formerly a decidedly middle-class destination, the store now carries the best-known luxury brands, lured by a environment that celebrates the architecture while introducing a subtle contemporary sensibility. A grand light-filled atrium—dominated by a monumental staircase, topped with a magnificently restored glass roof, and surrounded by wrought-iron balconies refinished in their original blue-gray glory—is the beating heart of the emporium. Drawing inspiration from visually similar structures such as the Grand Palais, the design team instituted curved glass fixtures and custom screens of woven metal mesh that balance and connect old and new rather than exacerbating contrast between past and present. The custom terrazzo flooring is by Karen Pearse, the strikingly graphic pattern in the center of the atrium referencing one in the neoclassical Galerie Vivienne arcade—another subtle evocation of La Belle Époque.

Yabu Pushelberg: George Yabu; Glenn Pushelberg

RDC Designs its Largest Equinox Gym Yet in San Francisco

2021 Best of Year winner for Fitness

San Diego. Los Angeles. Now add San Francisco to the locations of exercise facilities that RDC, or Retail Design Collaborative, has completed for Equinox. The firm’s latest gym for the brand occupies three floors of a landmarked 1960s office tower and features clever custom-crafted elements. Take the wood screen that defines the concierge area on the first level of the 35,600-square-foot space. Made of CNC-milled white oak, the screen provides a dynamic layering of geometric patterns—a “playful dichotomy of privacy and openness,” RDC associate principal and senior design director Jonathan Lopez says. The ceiling fixture above it, a weave of curved bronze rods and handblown glass, visually leads members and visitors onward.

On two, a portal to the wellness suite—containing lockers, showers, sauna, and spa—is composed of vertical steel plates and glass panels that are micro-ribbed on one side and back-painted a metallic copper on the other. The composition captures light and movement, creating a kinetic visual effect. But calmness reigns in the third-floor yoga and barre studio, where the ceiling incorporates radiant heating technology and soft, ambient lighting from rectangular soffits. Connecting all levels is a floating staircase surrounded by a continuous concrete-panel sheath. Now that’s a physical feat.

RDC: Mitra Esfandiari; Jonathan Lopez; Joseph Tran; Constance Rosado; Haleh Johnson; Lana Smolskaya