The Hannon mansion

In addition to the Horta Museum, Saint-Gilles has another remarkable Art Nouveau-style building: the Hannon mansion. It was named after the person who commissioned it, Edouard Hannon (an engineer by training and an amateur photographer). This private mansion is an exceptional creation, whose exterior and interior spaces are in perfect harmony.

It is the only Art Nouveau-style building created by the architect Jules Brunfaut.

EXTERIOR

Note this admirable, majestic façade, which spans an entire corner, enabling it to be seen from some distance away. The architect accentuated this corner with sculpted columns and a bas-relief by the sculptor Victor Rousseau.

An unusual wrought iron and stained glass structure emerges from the façade on the rue de la Jonction: it belongs to the interior garden, where a great many plants blended in with the floral decoration painted on the walls.

INTERIORS

Inside, Brunfaut did not use a light well to provide the stairway with zenithal lighting (as Victor Horta would have done). Instead, he designed an opaque cupola crowning the decoration in the stairwell and walls painted with a fresco by French painter Paul Albert Baudouin.

Although the motifs on the mosaic floor tiles and the subject of the fresco both evoke classical antiquity, they are quite characteristic of this Art Nouveau period.