Villa van Buuren, Art Deco house museum in Uccle, Belgium.
Villa van Buuren is a residence and museum in Uccle displaying furniture, tapestries, sculptures, and paintings from the 15th to 20th centuries arranged in their original rooms. The collections remain positioned as the family left them, offering a view of how these objects were lived with rather than displayed in formal galleries.
The house was built between 1924 and 1928 by architects Léon Emmanuel Govaerts and Alexis Van Vaerenbergh in the Amsterdam School style. David Van Buuren moved into the completed residence and filled it with his art collection over the following decades.
The house displays works by van Gogh, Ensor, and other expressionist painters that David Van Buuren actively collected during his lifetime. The rooms show how these paintings were actually lived with and displayed as part of the family's daily surroundings.
The museum is open Wednesday through Monday and located in a residential neighborhood of Uccle accessible by public transport. Visitors should know that the rooms feel intimate and compact since the house was designed as a family residence rather than a large exhibition space.
René Pechère's 1968–1970 addition to the gardens is the Garden of the Hearts, a romantic section that Alice Van Buuren saw as a complement to her villa. The Labyrinth, inspired by the Song of Solomon, received seven sculptures by André Willequet in 1968. In 2023 the gardens became the first Belgian site on the European Route of Historic Gardens.
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