A painter, architect, interior designer and teacher, van de Velde is the most international of our Belgian architects. A co-founder of Art Nouveau together with Paul Hankar, Victor Horta and Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, he continued his work in the Netherlands and Germany quite early on in his career. He was also an architect with a prolific written output, an art critic and a theorist whose writings are still studied today. His paintings and furniture are displayed in several European museums. His wife, the musician Maria Sèthe, was likewise immensely talented and certainly a source of inspiration for him.