Maison Guiette

René Guiette, an Antwerp artist of the avant-garde, saw Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the 1925 decorative arts exhibition in Paris and went on to commission a house and studio from him: it was the first commission Le Corbusier received from abroad. Guiette wanted his studio on the upper floors and a living room opening straight onto the garden. Le Corbusier also had to work with a narrow plot and with the planning rules that the city of Antwerp then applied.

The architect Paul Smekens supervised the building site, which lasted seven months between 1926 and 1927. René Guiette asked Le Corbusier for advice on the interior colours; Le Corbusier came in May 1927 to set the polychromy himself. The colour of the facades, by contrast, depended on the city's rules: the colour the architect wanted gave way to a stone-imitating render in blue-grey.

In 1963 a motorway project threatened the house; demonstrations took place in Antwerp to save it, and it was protected as a historic monument in 1978. Bought by new owners in 1987, it was restored under the architect Georges Baines: the slate cladding fixed to the facade around 1945 was removed and the facade turned white; exterior insulation was added and the joinery replaced with double-glazed metal frames. In the 1990s Georges Baines also built an extension to the house. Since 2016 the house has belonged to the World Heritage series.

The Maison Guiette belongs to the line of 1920s Purist houses such as the La Roche and Jeanneret houses and the Ozenfant house-studio. Le Corbusier takes up the five points of the new architecture, except the pilotis, left out so that René Guiette could step from his living room into his garden at ground level, and applies the principles of the Citrohan house. With a house in the Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart, it is the only realisation of that model; it is also Le Corbusier's only surviving work in Belgium.

The house rises over three levels topped by a roof terrace. The ground floor takes the living and dining rooms and the kitchen; the first floor is given over to sleeping, with the bedroom and bathroom; the second holds the double-height artist's studio, whose mezzanine leads up to the roof terrace. The vertical glazed wall, set slightly back, marks the bay of the straight-flight staircases, and the studio opens on the street side through a large glazed wall and a balcony. The roof terrace is walled in, with a small balcony on the garden side and an oculus in the side wall.

Inside, it is above all an abstract palette of colours that gives the whole its character: ultramarine, pale blue, periwinkle blue, burnt umber and sienna, pink, ochre, English green, greys and white, chosen to strengthen the walls or make them disappear and open up the space. Le Corbusier also planned several standard cabinets; only a writing desk and an L-shaped sideboard based on that model were made.

A private house, the Maison Guiette can be seen from the outside and is not open to visitors.