This palace was built in 1911 by the Viennese architect Joseph Hoffmann. The exterior of the building is entirely clad in white marble framed by golden moldings and is unique in Brussels. Unfortunately, it is not open to the public.
Galerie photos
Photo by PtrQs, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The history of the Stoclet Palace
Adolphe Stoclet was a Belgian civil engineer and banker who commissioned the construction of a mansion in Brussels designed by architect Josef Hoffmann of the Vienna Secession. Hoffmann headed the Wiener Werkstätte workshop, which influenced all avant-garde styles of the early 20th century. The palace, known for its meticulous details and high-quality materials, has hosted many important figures and was listed as a historic monument in 1976.
It was inhabited until 2002, when Anny Stoclet, Adolphe Stoclet’s daughter-in-law, passed away.
Description
The architect also created the furniture and numerous interior decorative elements in his workshops, from chandeliers to tableware and silverware. The dining room is entirely covered with mosaics designed from sketches by Gustav Klimt and executed by Leopold Forstner in marble, glass, and semi-precious stones. Today, Klimt’s drawings are on permanent display at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria.
After the inauguration, a popular rumor in Brussels claimed that the Stoclet Palace turned its back on Avenue de Tervuren to mark its owner’s hostility towards King Leopold II, who had initiated the construction of this avenue, a majestic road designed to connect the Cinquantenaire Park to the royal estate of Tervuren. Indeed, the people of Brussels were undoubtedly disconcerted by the austere appearance of this facade with its cubic lines covered in Carrara marble decorated with bronze moldings. The tower is topped with sculptures by Franz Metzner.
While the palace has a somewhat austere urban appearance on the street side, it opens up on the other side onto the garden, also designed by Hoffmann, with two symmetrical projections topped by terraces that connect the palace and garden into an inseparable whole. The garden echoes the geometric lines of the building. The succession of architectural and plant elements creates a continuous impression, with a path linking the pond, green rooms, pergolas, hornbeam arbors, and trimmed yews, basins, and planters, all of which have been preserved to this day.
Brussels versus the heirs
The Stoclet Palace was listed as a historic monument in 1976, but its contents, estimated at more than €30 million, were not.
The Brussels Region wanted to classify all the furnishings in order to propose them to UNESCO as World Heritage, but the heirs of Adolphe Stoclet, the owner of the property, opposed this. The Court of Cassation finally validated the classification procedure in 2013, and the furnishings were classified in 2006 after a detailed inventory. The Stoclet Palace was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009, but it remains inaccessible to the public.
