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Document Details :

Title: Het 'Huis Beaucarne'
Subtitle: Smaakevoluties in het decor van een burgerhuis van de 18de eeuw tot heden
Author(s): FORNARI, Julien
Journal: Tijdschrift voor Interieurgeschiedenis en Design
Volume: 41    Date: 2019   
Pages: 25-48
DOI: 10.2143/GBI.41.0.3286029

Abstract :
The ‘House Beaucarne’ dates from the mid-18th century and is to this day still the residence of the descendants of Jacques Beaucarne, who bought the house in 1748. Over the centuries the building underwent several modifications, which are still noticeable in certain places in the present-day interior of the house. Remnants of earlier interior elements, supplemented by numerous documents from the family archive, enable us to trace with great accuracy the building’s stylistic evolution over the centuries. What is striking is that the interior design effortlessly changes from a local Louis XIV and Louis XV style into the styles of the later 18th and 19th centuries, such as Directoire and Empire, and yet remains largely intact. Because the house has been inhabited by the same family throughout this period, large parts of the original furnishings also been largely preserved and here we can observe the same stylistic evolution. This obsession with interior furnishings had its counterpart in the adaptation of the garden and the embellishments of some of the buildings on the estate throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. A clear example is the protected grape conservatory, which was once the epitome of exoticism in these parts. In the 18th century it had a brightly polychromed façade of which now only the preserved wooden inner shutters still illustrate the erstwhile fashion for ‘Turkish tents’. In the 20th century the inhabitants made adjustments to the house with the intention of evoking the original state of the building, yet this caused them to abandon the idea of furnishing the house à la mode by continuing to develop it further on the basis of the styles already present. The present article about the ‘Huis Beaucarne’ reflects the importance of the evolution of interior design within a country gentleman’s home from the 18th to the late 20th century. It shows the preservation of styles from the past, but also the interest in new trends that are often an expression of the fashion within a particular period in combination with the taste of the erstwhile occupant of this special home. At the same time this case study also highlights the problems of how people dealt with architectural heritage and historic interiors in the 20th century prior to the ratification of the Venice Charter (1964).

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