Sven Grooten shows his house
Browse Photo's
I don't understand those people - who sometimes hold the most
cosmopolitan opinions - who insist on living in a particular place. It's
not where you live that is important, but how you live there. Certainly
it's a plus to live in a pleasant environment, but where it's located
on the map hardly makes any difference to me. My girlfriend happened to
see this house in Laeken for sale online. When she called me to say that
it was built by the architect Willy Van der Meeren, I didn't hesitate
for a moment. We went to see it straight away, put down an offer and the
house was ours. Van der Meeren is one of the last representatives of
modernism in Belgium. We have now restored the house to its original
state. That turned out to be a huge project: the house had been rented
out by the previous owner to a beauty parlour. Everything was pink,
there were false walls everywhere and the office furniture had
disappeared under a layer of plasterboard.
For me, the most important aspect of the house is the sense of security.
I also like the different textures in the building. These two elements
of the house are very successful: the materials employed and the raw
character of the walls, for example, are original elements which make
the house beautiful and give it the right atmosphere. The thing that
most strikes me is that there are clearly divided spaces. You can
withdraw; the occupants don't get in the way of one another. It's not
easy to live together in a small space and it's even harder to inhabit
large open spaces, such as you often get with loft apartments. You end
up living in an open prison where you are constantly under surveillance.
Living in an industrial space is a wonderful idea in principle, as long
as you offer people somewhere to retreat.
A lot of buildings designed in the Nineties look fantastic in
photographs: they tend to be large bare spaces, for example, or clean,
sterile white boxes. But I don’t think that you can really live there. I
don’t think people are made for that - at least not convivial people. A
house shouldn’t be a uniform, a style shouldn’t be imposed. Interior
design magazines can prescribe what they want, but some things are
embedded in our genes: we are looking for warmth and intimacy, like cave
dwellers, or like birds. For me a house is like a nest.
Our family consists of four people, but there are five chairs around the
table. That isn’t just chance: it means that we have a chair for a
guest, but it also means that we can each change places. It also means
you don’t have to sit facing one another. Four chairs represents
confrontation. Five chairs means that you can look somewhere else: you
are effectively sitting next to one another, and that’s less aggressive.
In any case, I prefer to avoid the number 4. It’s not an interesting
number. The number 4 almost never appears in number sequences. In
Fibonacci’s sequence - which underlies the proportions found in nature
and the golden ratio - the number 4 doesn’t appear. The number 5 is more
significant: for example, the planet Venus traces a trajectory in the
form of a pentagram in one year, and the proportions of the lines
connecting the points of a pentagon form a golden ratio. This shows that
beautiful things are related. I am constantly looking out for
connections like these.
I would like to build towers. I’m fascinated by their symbolism. Towers
aren’t useful in themselves - we don’t need to have cathedral spires
that rise 125 metres in the sky - but that simply makes them more
meaningful. It is all about power. They also illustrate the transience
of human life and the futility of efforts to transcend the human scale.
Building a tower implies a search for limits. They come to an end in
their search for infinity. And what’s the first thing that children do
when they’re building with blocks: they construct a tower. I would like
one day to live in a tower, ideally in Ostend, where you can see the
boats sailing out of the harbour, buffeted by the waves.
