A House We Admire: Simon de Burbure's VC House

Simon de Burbure's VC House is a 1,200 square metre villa in Knokke, built beside the Royal Zoute Golf Club for two art collectors, and it is a house we admire, not one we had any hand in.

We did not design it. The Original Stool, the first piece Studio Goons ever made, happens to sit in its living room, and that small coincidence is our reason for writing about a house we otherwise have no claim to. We have not been inside. We know it the way most people will, through the feature Sabato published in June 2025 and its photographs. What they show is worth looking at closely.

According to the feature, de Burbure is a Latem-based architect, thirty-five, who takes only eight projects a year, and he spent more than a thousand hours designing this one. The site held an old cottage by the architect Viérin that could not carry the new program, so it came down. What de Burbure kept, Sabato notes, was its logic: Viérin's row of columns returns as a grid that sets the rhythm of the plan. The magazine describes concrete ceilings cast against sandblasted planks exactly thirty centimetres wide, a dimension repeated across the house, a base clad in stone plates eight centimetres thick, and muschelkalk running through the kitchen island, the bath, and the stair. One material, one standard, used everywhere. We recognize that method, because it is ours too.

The stool, honestly

The Original Stool began as an offcut, a single piece left over from the workshop floor, kept because its shape held something, then developed into a stool and side table on legs cut from reclaimed architectural timber. It was the first piece we made, and we have never drawn it. Each one since is templated directly from that first, so nothing thins across the generations. In the photographs it stands beside a curved sofa, holding a lamp. A house resolved to this degree asks for nothing. That it made room for the smallest object we make, and the first, is what stays with us.

The Whitney, by coincidence

There is one more thing, and it is the reason we wanted to write this at all. Among the collection, the feature notes a painting by Art & Language of the brutalist interior of the former Whitney Museum in New York, its concrete ceiling a nod to the concrete of the garage below. That building sits at the start of our own story. Early in Paul's architecture education, a visit to the Whitney changed how he understood art. He saw work there by Richard Artschwager and Wade Guyton, simple in method and resolved to a high degree, and it set the standard we have worked toward since. The Art Rocker is a direct response to Artschwager. The habit of taking a plain material and pushing it until it is exact runs through everything we make, the Original Stool included.

Nobody arranged this. The owners chose their art, de Burbure built their house, and the stool was placed for how it worked. But our first piece ended up a few metres from a painting of the museum that taught us how to look. A piece carries where it came from, whether or not anyone reads it. This time, the room read it back to us.

Sabato published the house on 21 June 2025, with text by Thijs Demeulemeester and photographs by Thomas De Bruyne (Cafeine). The house was designed by Simon de Burbure.