26 DEPARTURES TRAVEL URBAN OASIS Divine Inspiration Antwerp’s celebrated designer Vincent Van Duysen stays close to home for his fi st hotel project, inside a former convent. by Gisela Williams NINETEEN YEARS AGO, Mouche Van Hool, a former interior designer, opened Hotel Julien in two adjacent 16th-century mansions in the Old City of Antwerp. With its smart design and eclectic mix of Art Deco and midcentury-modern decor, the property quickly became a magnet for the fashion and design crowd that has made the city Europe’s avant-garde capital. A few years ago, having noticed that her town’s hotel scene hadn’t kept pace with its international influence, Van Hool decided to open a second hotel, this time in a historic convent within a former military hospital complex. Turning the elegant but dilapidated Flemishstyle buildings, which had been empty for 20 years, into a luxury hotel would require a particular Antwerpian ingenuity, so Van Hool reached out to one of the city’s best-known designers, Vincent Van Duysen. From left: a lounge at the August; Hotel August’s historic brick façade “I knew he could bring the space back to life,” Van Hool told me. However, while Van Duysen, the 57-yearold art director of Molteni&C | Dada, is known for spare yet transcendent high-end residences around the world, as well as commissions by companies like B&B Italia and Swarovski, he had never designed a hotel (despite being asked to several times). “I was thrilled that my first hotel project would be in my hometown,” said the designer, who counts Julianne Moore and Kim Kardashian among his clients. He was also excited by the challenge of repurposing a sacred historical space that had sat unused for decades. According to Van Duysen, the cloister, once inhabited by nuns of the Order of Saint Augustine, still felt “spiritual in some way”. The renovation was “intense”, he added, “but we treated the rooms with respect and kept many original features”, FROM LEFT: ROBERT RIEGER, DAVID DE VLEESCHAUWER
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