Schaerbeek, it is increasingly said, is ‘the new St Gilles’. On a warm (or a snowy) day, Parc Josaphat bustles with what were once referred to as ‘Yuppies’ (young upwardly mobile professionals) and their families, attracted into the commune by still just attainable property prices. Notwithstanding the ongoing Covid restrictions, new bars and restaurants open every week, and Schaerbeek’s extraordinary architectural abundance – for long neglected – is becoming more fully animated, restored and embellished. For all its denizens, both old and new, Schaerbeek provides a sense of permanence and civic pride – as embodied not least in its neo-Renaissance Flemish style town hall.
Few could imagine that the commune was a largely rural space until the turn of the twentieth century. In 1830, Schaerbeek sported just 340 buildings and 1,800 inhabitants. Then a radical transformation began, rapidly turning farm and park land into a brimming conurbation, criss-crossed by roads, railways and tramlines. By 1860, there were 1,700 buildings and almost 16,000 inhabitants. By 1890, there were 7,350 and 53,000 respectively. In 1916, the commune counted 13,550 buildings and 100,350 inhabitants, and by 1930 there were almost 17,000 buildings and 120,000 inhabitants – the latter not so far off Schaerbeek’s current (2020) population figure of 133,000.
Nowhere better reflects this sense of breakneck urbanisation than one of Schaerbeek’s undoubted architectural and cultural jewels, the Eenens-Terlinden château, better known today as the Maison des Arts. To admire it, you must first find it, hidden away behind a narrow ‘porte cochère’ in the Chaussée de Haecht (n° 147) and invisible from all of the (built-up) roads that surround it. In 1826, a prosperous sheet salesman, Charles-Louis Eenens, and his wife, Anne-Marie Carlier, decided to build a country house (château) in the midst of what was then a large expanse of market gardens and parkland that they had acquired and which extended from the ponds at St Josse (long since disappeared) towards the place known as ‘Pogge’. Almost immediately, history was upon them. In September 1830, during the Belgian revolution, Dutch Prince Frederick took refuge in the house, imprisoning twenty hostages in the basement. Fearing poisoning, he refused to eat anything and drank only a cup of tea. It rapidly became clear that he would not be able to retake Brussels and he stayed long enough only to write a letter to his father communicating the bad news and then to withdraw. But the Eenens family kept the precious cup from which the Prince had drunk. It would later be donated to the commune and is exhibited in the house to this day.
When Charles-Louis Eenens died, the château passed to his three children, who rented it out until 1867 when a son, Lieutenant-General Alexis Michel Eenens, decided to live there. He, and the château, almost immediately fell victim to a terrible fait accompli. The new commune had been busily planning its expansion and layout. The plans included the construction of two parallel roads, running roughly North-East – the rue Royale-Saint-Marie (leading to Place Colignon and the new Hôtel communale and on out to Schaerbeek station), and the Chaussée de Haecht. The former effectively cut the château’s extensive garden in half. The necessary land was compulsorily purchased, and by the time the Lieutenant-General died in 1883, the château had been surrounded by roads and the new-build upon them, and also by new civic monuments such as the covered market of St Marie (now Les Halles de Schaerbeek), which towered just behind the house. Eenens meanwhile himself undertook a lot of work on the house, building two new wings, a huge library, stables and other outhouses.
The château was inherited by Alexis Michel Eenens’s only daughter, Thérèse, and her husband, Georges Terlinden, who had followed a brilliant career as a magistrate, and was procureur general of the Cour de Cassation for twenty-five years. They moved in with their many children and a succession of nannies (frequently British). Terlinden in turn began to embellish the house, installing parquet floors, an oak-lined dining room, a stately staircase, a veranda and a new brick tower, with plumbed bathrooms for each floor and a belvedere on the roof.
On 3 July 1918, Terlinden and his family were expelled and the house, considered to be conveniently near to the airfield at Evère, was requisitioned by the German Luftwaffe and occupied by a Major Brandenburg, an ace bomber pilot, who led a squadron of Gotha bombers on frequent raids over London. (The family records include an amusing story about how Terlinden’s best wines, hidden in a defunct hot air heating system, were almost discovered by the Major’s servants who, fortunately, in the end opted to use the open fires instead.) The occupation was, by all accounts, genteel, with the German Major giving a personal guarantee that the library and its vast collection of law books would not be touched.
During the war, Terlinden meanwhile used the seniority of his position to defend the independence of the Belgian judiciary. In 1921, in recognition of his wartime heroics, King Albert I made Georges Terlinden a Viscount, and he began to embellish the château accordingly.
Since the compulsory purchases and the road building had begun in the 1870s, the Eenens-Terlindens had basically opted to turn in on themselves. The family itself built houses on the Chaussée de Haecht, in part to act as a screen and in part to generate revenue. The main entrance to the château was transformed into a winter garden, with hanging plants grown to obscure the backs of the houses on the Chaussée. And the dining room was glazed with stained-glassed windows, which gave light but obscured the increasingly urban view. At the back of the house, meanwhile, large picture windows gave onto a small, well-manicured garden with trees planted and trained once again to obscure the surrounding buildings. (A fountain and a small water feature were added by the commune in the 1960s.)
The Viscount died in 1947, at the venerable age of 96, and the château was subsequently bought by the commune and transformed into what now serves as Schaerbeek’s Maison des Arts. Today, it houses the commune’s Service Culture. The old saddlery has been transformed into an agreeable estaminet. In normal times, the converted cellars are used as function rooms. The gardens, a veritable oasis of calm, are open to all visitors during opening hours. And the house itself frequently plays host to prestigious and well-attended art exhibitions. The building was partly classed as a national monument in 1985, and completely in 2015. An ambitious restoration programme began, and it was decided to restore the house and its décor as far as possible to its condition in the glory days of the 1891-1895 Terlinden period – the painstaking work slowly continues. Meanwhile, the Eenens-Terlinden château – once a country house, then a town house, then a neo-classical château – lives on as a thriving cultural centre and a unique example of defiant survival amid urban encroachment.
Information. Visit the Maison des Arts website for regular updates on its cultural activities: It is best to visit the Maison when an exhibition (and preferably a vernissage!) is underway but, beware, parking is impossible and it is best (and easiest) to come on foot, or by bike or by public transport.
Author’s note: I would like to thank Anne-Cécile Maréchal, Artistic Director of the Maison des Arts, and her staff, for having given me a guided tour to the Maison des Arts, allowed me to consult the Eenens-Terlinden family’s archives, with their many touching documents, and made editorial suggestions to this article.
