King's House, Museum building at Grand Place, Belgium

King's House (Maison du Roi/Broodhuis) stands on the north side of Brussels's Grand Place, opposite the Town Hall. Its pale grey neo-Gothic facade by Victor Jamaer has a ground-floor arcade of pointed arches, two tiers of tall arched windows with tracery, and a central tower with an open belfry and slender spire, flanked by two corner spires. The rear wing is plainer neo-Flemish Renaissance.

The first bread hall on this site is documented in 1321; a stone replacement followed in 1405. A late Gothic rebuild began in 1515 under Antoon II Keldermans, continued by Louis van Bodeghem and Hendrik van Pede, and was finished in 1536. After damage in the 1695 bombardment, the building was reconstructed in neo-Gothic form by Victor Jamaer between 1874 and 1896.

The building's name survives in two languages: French calls it Maison du Roi, though no king ever lived there, while Dutch keeps Broodhuis ("Bread House") after the bread market it replaced. Since 1911, commemorative plaques in French and Dutch flank the entrance, marking where Counts Egmont and Horn were beheaded in 1568. A 49-bell carillon from Adrien Causard's Tellin foundry was installed in the tower in 1895.

The building stands on the north side of the Grand-Place, directly opposite the Town Hall, with its entrance front facing the square. The museum inside is reached through the ground-floor arcade, and the commemorative plaques for the Counts of Egmont and Horn flank the entrance, placed there in 1911. The square is pedestrianised, so visitors arrive on foot from the surrounding streets.

Victor Jamaer did not merely restore the old building: he rebuilt it from 1874 to 1896 and added the two galleries and central tower that the 16th-century design had planned but never built. The present facade is therefore a 19th-century completion of an unfinished Gothic project.