House museums # 12: architect Victor Horta

Art Nouveau, the decorative style full of whiplash curves and vegetal energy that flowered at the end of the 19th century, put out its first shoots in illustration and household objects. In architecture, it seemed to spring fully formed in Brussels in 1892 in Victor Horta’s Tassel House. In the house’s columns, mosaic floors and balustrades, the stylised stems and wandering tendrils which were the leitmotif of the style were superabundant.

“Horta would have hated to be described as an Art Nouveau architect,” says Benjamin Zurstrassen. “His aim was to give to the century an architecture that was honest and sincere.”

Zurstrassen is curator of the Horta Museum, based in the town house the architect built in 1898 in the up-and-coming Brussels district of St Gilles to accommodate his family and the burgeoning practice built on the acclaim the Tassel House generated.

The entrance hall of Horta’s home leads straight on to the grand staircase — whose vinelike banister curls up to the light provided by an arching glass canopy three storeys above. The stairs open on to the dining room — with its striking off-white tiled walls — and music room, which form a single open floor. The space is part home, part showroom, combining several varieties of marble and rich American ash and mahogany in the panelling, doors and furniture.

On this bel étage a client would be dined, entertained and wowed by the decor, before a sideways move through a connecting door into the smoking room and Horta’s office in the atelier to talk business.

“His wife wanted it separate from the house but close by, because he worked 14-hour days,” says the museum’s guide and translator Marleen Cappellemans of the workspace. It’s easy to see where those hours went; every door, handle and escutcheon is an individual design. Horta worked like a sculptor: his sketches were turned into plaster models, then refined before being translated into stone, timber or metalwork by craftsmen off-site.

In the private spaces above, the opulent timber gives way to pitch pine and simpler finishes — the aquamarine watered silk wall covering of Mrs Horta’s dressing room is a notable exception.

The well-restored interior gives glimpses of its creator’s character. From a cupboard beside the couple’s bed a porcelain urinal pivots into the room — “he was a little obsessed by sanitary devices”, says Cappellemans.

Art Nouveau was to become inseparable from fin de siècle decadence but there is nothing louche about Horta’s work. From the dragonfly wings of the balcony metalwork to the stems and buds in the door mullions, his curves are the careful distillation of the insect and plant forms he studied in biology texts.

Art Nouveau burned brightly in Europe but was mostly spent by the 1910s. All that handcrafting was expensive and the excess of decoration looked frivolous in the tense political climate before the 1914-18 war. Horta himself continued to work until his death in 1947, returning to a blocky version of the neoclassicism he had previously abandoned for plant forms.

The museum, now a Unesco World Heritage Site, is a monument to the most flamboyant of styles at full spate.

hortamuseum.be

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