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Objects with Narratives presents Villa Westhinder – Forms in Residence, a site-specific design exhibition unfolding within architect Henry Van de Velde's Villa Westhinder in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium. Commissioned by Maurice Colman and completed in 1931, the villa stands as one of the most significant modernist residential projects, introducing the principles of the International Style and Bauhaus to the Belgian seaside. “Its silhouette stands apart from its surroundings, most strikingly through its flat roof and sweeping horizontal lines, formal gestures that echo the utopian modernist vision of architecture as a vessel for a new way of inhabiting the world. In this sense, the villa resonates with the spirit of Le Corbusier's conception of the house as a machine à vivre, a container not merely for bodies, but for a future yet to be lived,” Objects with Narratives note.
Designed by one of Belgium's leading pioneers of Art Nouveau, Van de Velde envisioned the house as an architecture for modern living. “Yet to stand inside Villa Westhinder today is to experience something more complex than a purely forward-looking gesture. The house carries within its walls a distinct sense of suspended time, a quality in which past and present seem to coexist rather than succeed one another,” the design gallery notes.
Responding to the setting, Forms in Residence brings together contemporary artists and designers whose works resonate with the villa's architectural identity. Rather than recreating or referencing the past, the exhibition explores how contemporary objects can engage with modernist heritage through materiality and craftsmanship. “Each piece connects, in its own way, to a different thread of time, some evoking the geometric rigour of early modernism, others the tactile warmth of mid-century making, others still the restrained confidence of a craft tradition carried quietly forward,” the contemporary design gallery notes.
The designers on view include Lukas Cober with his New Wave stools, lamps by Studio Nicholas Ewauw, Karl Monies’s B.L. lighting designs, sculptural design objects by Maarten Vrolijk and Deceres Studio, and furniture designs by Manuel Bano, Elissa Lacoste and Middernacht & Alexander, among other products and designers.
The showcase also acknowledges the villa's own evolution, including Aurélie Penneman's thoughtful redesign of the kitchen and its wooden hallway, reinforcing the house as a living architectural environment shaped through successive interventions. “The fundamental question animating this project is one of belonging: how can contemporary works find their place within an architecturally charged and historically loaded environment without erasing what came before? The answer proposed here is not assimilation, but resonance, a careful orchestration of forms, old and new, that makes the house feel not frozen in time, but richly, generously alive within it,” Objects With Narratives concludes.
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