Objects With Narratives Meets Henry Van de Velde at Villa Westhinder

Throughout August, Villa Westhinder, overlooking the dunes of Knokke-Le-Zoute on Belgium’s North Sea coast, hosted the Summer Group Show by Objects With Narratives, presented in collaboration with Julie & Olivia Saverys. The exhibition brings contemporary art and design into dialogue with the identity of one of the Belgian coast’s most compelling examples of modernist architecture.

Rather than serving simply as an exhibition setting, Villa Westhinder becomes an integral part of the project. The works engage with the house’s geometries, materials and surrounding landscape, creating a narrative in which architecture, applied arts and nature overlap.

Commissioned by Maurice Colman and completed in 1931, the villa was designed by Henry Van de Velde, a pivotal figure in European design culture between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Originally trained as a painter before turning to the applied arts, design and architecture, Van de Velde is considered, alongside Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, one of the leading figures in the emergence of Art Nouveau in Belgium. Architect and patron were also connected by a shared cultural sensibility: Colman himself was a passionate art lover and collector.

Van de Velde’s trajectory soon moved beyond Art Nouveau towards an increasingly modern conception of architecture, in which space, furniture and objects formed part of a unified vision. Villa Westhinder belongs to this evolution in his practice. Its plain surfaces, open plan, modular system, flat roof and emphasis on horizontal lines reveal the influence of the International Style and Bauhaus culture. In a seaside town still largely defined by more traditional architectural forms, the villa introduced a radically different way of living - rational and functional, and, at the time of its construction, resolutely oriented towards the future. In this sense, Villa Westhinder can also be read within the broader cultural climate that led Le Corbusier to formulate his idea of the house as a machine à habiter: not merely a shell, but an instrument through which a new way of everyday life could be imagined.

Seen today, however, Villa Westhinder conveys something more complex than a manifesto directed solely towards the future. The clean lines and rational volumes that announced modernity in the 1930s have, over time, acquired the character of memory. Past and present seem to coexist within the same architecture: modernism is no longer perceived simply as a rupture with what came before, but as another layer upon which new interventions can take place.

It is precisely this layered dimension that Objects With Narratives chooses to inhabit. The exhibition brings together contemporary works connected not by a uniform aesthetic, but by their ability to establish relationships across different periods, materials and visual languages.

Among them, Manuel Bano’s OBJ-12 Dining Table, Tim Vranken’s Arcus Sofa and Laurids Gallée’s SL02 engage with the domestic character of the villa, while Lionel Jadot’s Automatic Writing Chair X, Karl Monies’ B.L. 24 and Tom Jablin’s Marble Bay Bench offer distinct explorations of material, form and the very idea of furniture as an object. The exhibition also includes Elissa Lacoste’s Coenosteum and Middernacht’s Arsenic Fog Dining Table.

The works are not simply placed inside Villa Westhinder: the villa itself becomes part of the exhibition. The architectural context alters the way the objects are perceived, while the objects, in turn, invite a new reading of the architecture. Van de Velde’s original conception is joined by successive interventions on the house, including the more recent work of Belgian interior architect Aurélie Penneman, creating a space in which different periods remain visible without necessarily coming into conflict.

The question, then, becomes one of belonging: how can a contemporary work find its place within such an architecturally charged and historically layered environment without erasing what came before? The answer suggested by the exhibition is not assimilation, but resonance — not the imposition of a contemporary voice onto the building, but the coexistence of different forms and temporalities.

Another layer is added by the landscape itself. Villa Westhinder stands before the dunes of Knokke-Le-Zoute, in a setting shaped by wind, sand and the constant movement of the North Sea. Here, the precision of architectural geometry encounters the unstable, ever-changing forms of nature.

This relationship extends into the interiors. In Aurélie Penneman’s recent intervention, a powder-blue kitchen with softly curved countertop edges evokes the colours and contours of the coastal landscape. In a similar way, several works in the exhibition introduce organic profiles and undulating forms that interrupt the precision of the architecture, establishing a connection between the interior and the landscape beyond it.

The Summer Group Show unfolds within these very tensions. House and landscape, geometry and organic form, memory and contemporaneity are not presented as opposites, but as elements capable of coexisting. Nearly a century after its construction, Villa Westhinder continues to question what modern living can mean — not as a space frozen in its own history, but as an architecture still capable of welcoming new objects, languages and temporalities.

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Words: Simone Lorusso