Stoclet Palace
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How it came to be
In 1905 Adolphe Stoclet, a Belgian banker and art collector, commissioned a house in Brussels from the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann. Hoffmann was 35 and a founding member of the Vienna Secession. Stoclet gave him wide freedom, and the house and garden were finished in 1911.
The aim was a total work of art, with architecture, interiors, furniture, functional objects and garden designed as one whole, and it was the first residential commission of the Wiener Werkstätte, which Hoffmann had co-founded in 1903. Gustav Klimt designed the mosaic friezes of the dining room, and his preparatory designs for them are in the MAK in Vienna. Four copper male figures by Franz Metzner stand on the tower above the stairwell.
After Stoclet died in 1949 the house passed to his daughter-in-law Annie, and it was listed as a historic monument in 1976. When Annie died in 2002 her four daughters inherited it. It still holds most of its original fittings and furniture and has had no major alterations, and it was inscribed in 2009. The house has never been open to the public; in 2024 the Brussels Parliament passed a motion calling for it to open for up to 15 days a year.
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