Explore an antique dealer's exceptional 16th-century Guild House in Belgium

HOUSE TOUR | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA

A teenage romance led antique dealer Johan Van Dijck and artist Kaat Van Doren towards a shared life shaped by objects, history, and attention. In their 16th-century guild house in Mechelen, Belgium, across different floors unfold as the record of a life spent looking. 

BY EMMA BECQUE | ROOMS & GARDENS | 23 JANUARY 2026

A stencilled green border makes a striking backdrop for Johan Van Dijck and Kaat Van Doren's Suzani textiles and foraged finds © Isabel Bronts.

On the main street in the historic centre of Mechelen, Belgium, the brick facades of the home belonging to antique dealer, Johan Van Dijck, and the artist, Kaat Van Doren, are modest enough to disguise the scale of what unfolds behind their doors.

Built in the late 16th-century as a guild house, the property first functioned as a place of gathering, organization and work for the city’s trades. The street still bears that history in its name, recalling a period when shippers, fishermen and other guilds occupied the surrounding buildings. That purpose remains legible in the architecture, the depth and generosity of the rooms, and the way the building seems predisposed to collective life.

Today, the house supports a different form of community. Across different floors, the couple live alongside their two daughters, each occupying a wing within the labyrinth mansion. Both raised here and shaped by the environment, the youngest is an interior designer and the oldest follows in her father's footsteps as an antique dealer.

Fondly known as "an unfinished jigsaw puzzle", the home continues to reveal and surprise its canny owners who welcome new historical discoveries with research and care. “In the 20th century, the street was known for jewellery ateliers, and the building became a place where a jeweller could live and work,” Johan explains. 

That stratified history remains visible at street level, where a 1960s shopfront, inserted during a later warehouse phase, is now the perfect frame for Kaat's studio awaiting golden hour. “We had the original 18th-century plans and thought to restore the facade. But now people come to see the window. Young groups walk the street looking for this feature, so we must leave it.”

When Kaat first entered the house in 2001, romance was not the prevailing impression. “It was full of pigeon dirt,” she recalls. “The roof was broken. There were no windows.” The property had languished on the market, expensive and largely dismissed by buyers unwilling to confront the extent of the work required.

What shifted her response was the structure's survival beneath the neglect. “The period pieces were still there,” she says. “The chimneys, the beautiful staircase, all the wooden floors.” Much of what survives today dates from the 18th-century, though parts of the building date back to the end of the 16th-century.

The city listed the building as a monument shortly after the purchase, an “official and proud recognition we knew the place deserved,” Kaat explains. “When we bought it, it was a possibility that a developer would knock it down, we really wanted to protect it.” 

What convinced her was the staircase and unusual split-level plan: “There are two houses. A house in front and a house behind, stitched together," she explains. To the rear, a south-facing garden sits enclosed, producing a complete reversal of the street outside. “People arrive with buses and traffic in front of the house, and then they go to the garden and it is like the countryside. You don’t hear anything.”

Johan's atelier, curated in the style of 19th-century painter's studios © Isabel Bronts.

The couple undertook the renovation in a single campaign, funded by the sale of their previous house. “We learned to renovate with a soft touch,” Kaat says. “We really tried to keep everything original. We did not want a clean look.”

In the entrance hall, paintings lean against walls, sculptures cluster on consoles, and objects bought decades ago remain in use. “It is very instinctual,” Johan says of their approach. “But instinctual does not mean random.”

Decades of looking, buying, selling and living with objects have produced an interior in which density feels sustained rather than chaotic, supported by the generosity of the rooms and the way the house unfolds through interlocking levels. 

“We spend most of our time in the kitchen,” Kaat says. The wall of Delft tiles began with a discovery during renovation. “I found remnants of Delft tiles in the wall,” Johan explains. “So I decided to put my collection against it.” Gathered over more than two decades, the tiles were added gradually, one prompting the next. Among them is one Johan mentions with particular fondness: “With a tiny giraffe in the middle.”

The bathroom is a modern-day cabinet of curiosities. Alongside the seascapes are shells, plaster casts and 19th-century French optical engravings from France © Isabel Bronts.

Previously divided into two, a seven-metre beam, sourced from a salvage dealer in Bruges, unites the property's two zones. “We had to search for an old beam large enough,” Johan says, “because otherwise the house would fall.” 

The kitchen island, crafted by Johan from surviving panelling uncovered during the works. “There was one piece in good condition,” Kaat explains. “So I put it against the table that we had. It was practical, but it’s now our favourite feature.”

Elsewhere, an 18th-century marble fireplace anchors the dining room, surrounded by Louis XV armchairs, a bronze bust by the Mechelen sculptor Ernest Wijnants, Syrian brass vases and an Empire clock. Johan’s magpie eye and Kaat’s instinct for composition are evident throughout. The blue room gathers 18th-century furniture, Persian rugs and a Japanese screen. Even the smallest rooms resist neutrality; the guest bathroom – a cabinet of curios – is brimming with shells, fragments, and miniature objects.

One of the many bedrooms within the house is draped with Suzani fabrics from Uzbekistan and Mahogany Empire furniture © Isabel Bronts.

“We met as teenagers and admired each other’s love for antiques and art, a way of looking at and seeing the world,” Kaat recalls. Date nights consisted of flea-market trawling and collecting. “Twenty, thirty years ago, I woke at 4am to go to the Brussels flea market,” Johan says. “That’s where I started De Roeck & Van Dijck Antiques.”

Kaat’s studio occupies the attic, a configuration enabled by the building's scale. “I can spend time in the house without knowing that somebody is downstairs having visitors,” she says. “Everybody has their own life in the house.”

That capacity to hold parallel lives has become increasingly central as their daughters have remained closely connected to the building. What began as a family home has evolved into a shared structure, with work, social life and domestic routines layered across the five floors. “Friends and family friends of our daughters are welcome here,” Johan says.

What began as a family home has evolved into a shared structure © Isabel Bronts. 

Asked to describe the spirit of the house, Johan compares it to a late 18th-century earthenware plate: “almost broken, but clamped, there is beauty in the fragility” he says. “A plate is an object that continues to connect people, just like our home.”

The estate is a patchwork of history, “it gives you another dimension when you live with history at your side,” Johan says, describing the house as “putting you in another dimension". Subsequently, it humbles the family, enabling them to see themselves as transient hosts within. “We all recognise ourselves in the paintings, books and sculptures we choose to have around us, and of course in the house itself,” Kaat relays. 

Leaving the house, the impression is not of a collection arranged for effect but of a structure still performing its original function: a place designed for collective life, now reactivated through family, work and shared routines. Rooms shift function, objects migrate between floors and generations, and a family joyfully coexist without formality.

Around the 18th-century marble fireplace sits a collection of Louis XV style armchairs pivoted around a bronze bust of Mechelen painter, Ernst Wijnansts © Isabel Bronts.