C an you imagine buying a flat without ever actually stepping inside it? And then doing up the entire place – bashing down walls, jettisoning fittings and reshuffling the floorplan – remotely? For most of us the answer would be an emphatic, “Of course not!” Kim Verbist would say otherwise. The Belgian interior designer did all of the above when she embarked on the convention-defying transformation of her Brussels apartment, set on the 11th floor of a Brutalist block designed by architect Jacques Wybauw. Covid played its part.
Verbist and her partner, Sofie Van Waeyenberge, were enjoying a break at their weekend cottage on a beach in the Netherlands when lockdown struck. They had just bought the apartment, sealing the deal with a text “sent at midnight”. Previously occupied by a penniless aristocrat, the property had been untouched for decades.
With its dark corridors and a damp-ridden bathroom, it was the definitive fixer-upper. Verbist was unfazed. The couple’s previous city home, a few blocks down the road, had been designed by the same architect.
“I know how his structures work; which walls I could knock down. I knew the materials would be sound,” she says. Her secondary school was also by Wybauw.
In a city better known for its sinuous art-nouveau townhouses, the teenage Verbist learned to appreciate then-unfashionable 1970s architecture. “The light..
. the way the spaces flowed. His design is in my DNA.
” It also helped that before setting up her own p.