SET ON A cobblestone street in the middle of Antwerp’s wealthy Berchem neighborhood, the 63,000-square-foot Castle de Bergeyck looks like a stately if unremarkable block of luxury flats behind a red-brick facade. It’s only from the complex’s private garden and small park that you get a full view of the gables, turrets and spires that adorn the centuries-old building. In the 1990s, its then owner, from the Bergeyck family, converted the structure into six separate apartments. Today one of the apartments, a 4,300-square-foot, three-story, four-bedroom space, is home to Axel Van Den Bossche, 63, a co-founder of the Belgium-based housewares company Serax and of the design brand Valerie Objects, and his wife, the artist and ceramist Marie Michielssen, 60.
In 2018, when many of their contemporaries with children were moving to the suburbs, Van Den Bossche and Michielssen did the opposite, trading their home in the sleepy, forested town of Brasschaat, just northeast of the city, for one in Antwerp. “We were missing the energy of the city,” says Michielssen. “I need the stimulation of urban life for my work,” adds Van Den Bossche. (The Serax headquarters are in the small town of Kontich, about 10 minutes’ drive south of their home.) But the couple, whose four boys were then between the ages of 14 and 27, agreed that they would only move if they found a place that provided space, light and a garden. When a real estate agent told them about the apartment in the Castle de Bergeyck, they signed a contract within a week.
Construction of the original castle began in the second half of the 16th century, when Antwerp was one of Europe’s key trading centers, but it wasn’t completed until the first few decades of the 17th century, delayed time and again during the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648), the conflict in which Belgium and the Netherlands rebelled against Spanish rule. By 1897, the castle belonged to Baron Amédée Pierre Marie de Caters, the onetime administrator of the Suez Canal, who added the red-brick exterior, embellished with decorative accents of yellow bricks and white natural stone, in the predominant architectural style of the time, known as neo-Flemish Renaissance. Van Den Bossche and Michielssen were immediately drawn to the layered history of the building (“an old house with an old soul,” says Michielssen). Equally appealing to the couple, the apartment had already been thoroughly updated by its previous owner, who installed a state-of-the-art kitchen and a subterranean lap pool.
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