Hotel du baron Buffin

Hôtel Buffin is the kind of Brussels townhouse that rewards a slow look rather than a quick photo. It stands at rue Caroly 19 in Ixelles, just a few steps from square de Meeus, and it belongs firmly in the canon of Belgian Art Nouveau — not because it's the largest or best-known example, but because its decorative scheme is unusually coherent from ground floor to cornice.

Who designed it, and when?

The building was completed in 1904 to a design by Henri Jacobs, an architect mostly associated with school buildings across Brussels and its surroundings. Private houses were a rarer commission for him, which is part of what makes Hôtel Buffin notable within his body of work: it's one of the few residential projects he left behind outside his usual repertoire of public architecture.

What does the facade actually show?

The facade is the real subject here. On the first floor, the windows are crowned with sgraffiti in a distinctive palette of brown, yellow and green, and those same colors reappear in the tiles filling the transom windows above — creating a visual continuity that ties the different decorative elements together into one reading.

The second floor works to a slightly different rhythm: rectangular, four-part windows sit behind projecting balconies. Each balcony carries a painted lambrequin in the same color range as the sgraffiti below, and each is topped by a small entablature resting on two stone corbels. This repeating module — balcony, lambrequin, entablature — gives the upper facade a beat that balances the flatter composition of the ground and first floors.

The whole composition is capped by a deep main cornice, carried on two substantial stone console blocks and nine smaller corbels. Between them run ten small sgraffiti, painted in the same brown-yellow-green triad used throughout the rest of the facade. This decorative band closes off the composition, and despite the density of detail, the building doesn't read as overloaded: the color scheme repeats consistently from street level to roofline, so the eye is naturally drawn upward rather than overwhelmed at any single point.

Why it's worth the detour

Rue Caroly and the streets around square de Meeus are one of the pockets of Ixelles where turn-of-the-century architecture has survived in good condition without turning into a mass tourist draw. Hôtel Buffin has no ticket booth and no queue — it's a private residential building, appreciated from the pavement while walking the street. For anyone exploring Brussels Art Nouveau beyond the most obvious names (Horta, Hankar), it's a useful case study in how the style translated into the hands of an architect who mostly worked in a completely different building type, and how consistently he was able to carry that vocabulary down to the scale of a single private house.

Frequently asked questions

Who designed Hôtel Buffin? Architect Henri Jacobs, completed in 1904.

Where exactly is it located? At rue Caroly 19 in Ixelles, near square de Meeus.

What's its most distinctive feature? The brown-yellow-green sgraffiti repeated at first-floor level, at second-floor level, and in the band beneath the main cornice, combined with the painted lambrequins on the second-floor balconies.

Can visitors go inside? No — it's a private building, and the experience is limited to viewing the facade from the street.