Les Peupliers School Gymnasium

In Vilvoorde, the Les Peupliers girls' boarding school was founded in the late nineteenth century and first run by the sisters Byna and Emma Lefébure. From 1900 it occupied a nineteenth-century house in a large garden. Between 1903 and 1925, under Emma Lefébure's direction, it became a model school in which physical education, with daily gymnastics lessons, held a major place beside academic teaching. Teachers qualified at the Stockholm gymnastics institute gave Swedish gymnastics classes there: it was the first institution in Belgium to practise the method.

To introduce it, Emma Lefébure followed the lead of her brother, Colonel Lefébure. In 1898 he had travelled to Sweden on a mission for the Minister of War, and he went on to publish a forceful plea for renewing physical education, which lay behind the spread of Swedish gymnastics in Belgium.

Horta belonged to the colonel's close circle of friends, and his daughter was a pupil at the school; he agreed to design a suitable hall. Built in 1904-1905 on the colonel's instructions, it was carried out under Horta's personal direction. Lighting, ventilation and the equipment peculiar to the new discipline stood at the heart of the project.

When Emma Lefébure retired in 1925, the city took over the buildings to house its services. The hall was later used by the municipal academy of music, speech and dance, until around 2000. It was listed as a monument in 1999, together with its original equipment, but stood empty and went on decaying. The restoration, directed by aNNo architecten and carried out by the contractor Renotec, began in February 2025. The restored hall was opened to the public on 13 September 2026, Open Monument Day.

The hall is a rectangular brick volume of five bays and a single storey, set parallel to the street under a shallow zinc-clad gabled roof. Its design is plain and strictly functional, and its brick exterior reveals nothing of the interior. In the early 2000s the hall was largely hemmed in by the municipal bath house, built against it in the 1930s.

High-set, fairly large rectangular windows bring in as much light as possible; their lower part is fixed and their upper part tilts. Beneath them, the ventilation openings in the façade, which had been bricked up, were brought back by the restoration. Between the windows, long wall anchors point to the roof's internal supports, decorative metal brackets. Inside, the ceiling is slightly curved.

The restoration also brought back the original warm colour scheme. The period apparatus was kept and fitted into the restored interior, including three types of climbing frames, ropes and rings, ladders and balance beams.

Since the restoration the hall has served as a dance studio for the municipal academy of music, speech and dance. It has been given a sprung dance floor and upgrades for accessibility, energy performance, fire safety and acoustics. The school's original annex, brought into the project, houses changing rooms and toilets among other things.

The hall is used for the academy's dance classes; it can be seen from outside, in the Bolwerkstraat.