A house of 1979
The living rooms sit a few steps above the kitchen, under exposed timber joists, and open through walls of glass to the terrace and the garden. The house around them is Lou Jansen's design of 1979 at Lusthovenlaan 21 in Mortsel, four bedrooms in about 280 square meters (3,014 square feet) on a plot of 928 square meters, and it is recorded in the Flemish inventory of built heritage.
The inventory entry, written by Greet Plomteux and Rita Steyaert in 1985, describes a long house divided lengthwise into three strips that can be read in the roof. The middle strip carries every stair and duct, and the two outer strips hold the rooms; across the house the volumes step from one level to the next, separated by stairs according to their use. It gives the construction as concrete block, with a structure of metal columns and brick and cast concrete slabs.
The record
The house appeared as "Huis te Mortsel/1979" in the Belgian architecture magazine A+, number 63, in March and April 1980. Flanders entered it in its inventory of built heritage in September 2009 and confirmed it as vastgesteld bouwkundig erfgoed, established built heritage, by a decision signed on 14 March 2019.
Ludovicus "Lou" Jansen was born in Turnhout in 1935, took his architecture diploma at Sint-Lucas in Brussels in 1960 and taught architectural design at the Henry van de Velde Institute in Antwerp. He kept an office in Turnhout with Rudy Schiltz and died in Oosterlo in 2019.
The rooms
The kitchen on the ground floor opens straight onto the terrace. A few steps up are the dining room and two sitting areas, one with an open fireplace under a steel hood, and an office beside them. The main bedroom has a level of its own, with a dressing room, a bathroom and a terrace over the garden; the top floor holds three more bedrooms and a second bathroom under the pitched timber roof and its glazing.
A sauna, a fitness room and a heated indoor pool that connects to the outdoor pool complete the house. Terraces and a planted pergola run along the garden, and the plot reaches through to Edmond Thieffrylaan at the back.
