The creative community behind the coolest new hotel in Brussels

For interior architect and designer Lionel Jadot, designing a hotel is like directing a movie. The 53-year-old Belgian is no stranger either. In addition to coming up with plans for hotels in Lisbon and wineries in France, remodeling penthouses for private clients in London, overseeing a new European conviviality company, and managing Zaventem Ateliers, a sprawling studio complex that houses the design cooperative he founded in 2017, Jadot has also made three short films and one feature film. “I think in frames,” he says. He describes himself as “an adventurer”, and is always on the go: in his spare time he goes on motorcycle vacations exploring the remotest parts of India and Costa Rica.

Today he’s behind the wheel of his jet black 1966 Mustang, navigating Friday traffic in Brussels towards his biggest and most ambitious project yet: Mix. With a 180-room hotel, three restaurants, a food market, a co-working space, an auditorium, and a gym, Mix is ​​housed in a gigantic 1969-era Functionalist building. Formerly known as La Royale Belge, in honor of to the insurance company that commissioned it as its headquarters, the 40,000 m2 building bears witness to a bygone era of luxurious corporate architecture. Conceived by René Stapels and Pierre Dufau, its corten steel structure is arranged in the shape of a cross on a transparent base and overlooks an ornamental pond and a beech forest. Clad in a caramel-colored glass mirror, it has the luxuriously menacing scent of a Bond villain’s lair.

Jadot won the contract to reimagine the interiors two years ago, with a proposal to fill the building with site-specific works by local artists and designers. He was especially interested in Mix being a showcase for the community of creatives he has created in Zaventem Workshops – and for Belgian design more widely. “I don’t like it when everything fits perfectly with matching colors,” says Jadot of the melting pot. “In this way, the hotel becomes a great communication tool: there are thousands of stories about the objects and the people behind it.” With this, he picks up a brass coat rack and begins an animated monologue about design development with Fonderie Woit, a decades-old foundry established in Liège, near the German border.

If you want to create objects and projects with a soul, you need to have fun

More than 52 artists from the Zaventem team and beyond have contributed pieces to the hotel, from door handles to a 4m-tall wooden sculpture. Every detail is commissioned as a work of art. Belgian studio Krjst has designed bespoke tapestries for the main restaurant and bedroom windows. sister and brother duo Alexandra and Grégoire Jonckers, famous for their large-scale metal, mineral and resin work (and occupying the largest studio in Zaventem, with their octogenarian sculptor father Armand), have done a grand reception desk in their signature etched brass. Roxane Lahidji, French designer who creates furniture made of a natural salt compound extracted from the Rhône delta, he has created more than 200 lamps for the bedrooms and 12 for the hall. And the food market features a monumental 157m cinder block bar created by a Zaventem alumnus. bram vanderbekedesigned to complement the original concrete diagrid roof.

“I don’t know many architects or designers who would invite so many others to contribute,” says Vanderbeke, who now lives in Ghent. “I think that’s going to create very strong elements within the space.” He laughs. “To do a crazy project like [Mix] You have to be like Lionel.”

Born into the Brussels-based Vanhamme family of furniture makers, Jadot was tinkering in the workshop below his parents’ apartment from the age of six, until he became a sixth-generation craftsman. When his mother died unexpectedly, leaving his father heartbroken, Jadot gave up a place at the Florence design school to take over the family business and oversee a team of 35 artisans at the age of 19. some things, I don’t know other things, you’ll have to help me.’ I learned a lot.” Eleven years later, he decided to go it alone and established his own studio in 2001 with a reputation for recycling.” [upcycling is] a concept, but I was always very aware that there were many things left over (marble, metal, food) that we could use”, he says.

Zaventem Ateliers grew out of Jadot’s understanding of collective creativity and a mission to reboot a medieval craft guild. In 2015 he discovered an abandoned 19th century paper mill near the Brussels airport, on the outskirts of the city. With funding from various investors, he spent a year turning the three-story, 6,000-square-foot brick building into 32 glass-fronted workshops centered around a showroom, and established a board to help him choose tenants. They preferred analog makers with specialized skill sets who were eager to participate in a modern creative network.

Today, Zaventem Ateliers is home to 24 independent makers (including weavers, carpenters, cutlers, and sculptors), as well as Jadot’s own practice, which employs 10 full-time people. Long-term leases at favorable prices encourage designers to put down roots. There is an open source database of both contractors and collectors. Then there’s the socializing, gently fueled by Belgian beer: in addition to a now-legendary opening party in 2018, which boasts 1,500 guests, artists meet daily in the communal kitchen, on the rooftop terrace, or in front of the open. fire. For the Belgian designer arno declercq, whose blackened wood furniture has admirers among architects Peter Marino and Kim Kardashian, and who created Mix’s 4m-tall lobby sculpture in iroko wood sourced from Benin, such interaction is a welcome respite from their workdays. of 12 hours. “Otherwise he would be a monk,” he laughs. Designer Pierre Coddens agrees: “If you want to create objects and projects with a soul, you need to have fun. Without fun… objects will be meaningless.”

This modern guild and its new creation, Mix, are another facet of Brussels’ ongoing cultural renaissance: a city once dismissed as bureaucratic, bourgeois and boring. More than 650 gallery shows were featured on the city’s agenda.brussels platform in 2022. New contemporary art spaces are emerging, such as the Fondation Blan, and established players are expanding: last August, Xavier Hufkens celebrated his 35th 2nd anniversary adding a 2,200m2 modern building space to its existing gallery in a 19th century terraced house. Meanwhile, all eyes are on the long-awaited opening of the Kanal-Centre Pompidou Brussels, which is set to become one of the world’s largest museums of contemporary and modern art when it opens in 2025 in the former Citroën showroom. on the Brussels-Charleroi canal. .

“In recent years, Brussels has become a place where many international artists, representing several generations, live and work. It’s an incredibly rich landscape,” says Kasia Redzisz, Kanal’s artistic director, formerly of Tate Liverpool. “Brussels is avant-garde, critical, humorous, surreal. Marcel Broodthaers’ performance entering the Palais des Beaux-Arts with a camel in 1974 is a perfect reflection of this. I do not think it does [have happened] in Liverpool. No wonder psychiatrists at Brugmann University Hospital are testing a pilot study prescribing free museum visits in Brussels to help with exhaustion and anxiety.

“I think people in Belgium are open-minded and don’t take themselves so seriously. We don’t care, we just want to do”, agrees Jadot. It is this open mindedness that he seeks to honor with the confluence of creativity on display in Mix. “It is not a collective, it is more like a family. We are all different, we do many things. But in the end, when we do something together, it generates energy.”

Mix opens June 23 at 25 Boulevard du Souverain, 1170 Brussels; mix.brussels; lioneljadot.com