In 1905, my great-great-grandfather Adolphe Stoclet and his wife, Suzanne, commissioned Josef Hoffmann, the avant-garde architect and a leading figure of the Vienna Secession, to design a house for them in Brussels. By 1911, the building was complete—a geometric masterpiece that defied the Art Nouveau norms of the time and predicted the Art Deco and early modernist movements that would follow. To the world, it was Le Palais Stoclet. To my family, it was home.
While I’ve only ever been a visitor there—my branch of the family lost ownership in the 1950s—family gatherings have always been filled with stories of Le Palais Stoclet. My father, Eric, remembers Sunday lunches and playtime in the sprawling gardens as a child. My grandfather Philippe would tell us how his school-mates were forever teasing him for living in a marble house. The family always hated the word “palace” being used to describe our home.
There were tales of the huge marble bath that took hours to heat up in the winter, and of how during the Second World War the family grew tomatoes on the building’s terrace and kept rabbits. (Adolphe, who had business and family connections in Germany but was not pro-Nazi, was visited several times during the war by high-ranking German officers who wanted to ensure the art collection was “safe” from bombardment.) It wasn’t until I got older that I understood the house’s cultural significance. It’s considered the best surviving realization of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art.”
To those who pass by its central location on Avenue de Tervueren, it is visible yet off limits. However, a recently passed law is set to change that, whether my family likes it or not.
In 2009, the palais became a UNESCO World Heritage site, one of only 16 in private hands. Ans Persoons, the secretary of state for the Brussels-Capital Region for Urban Planning and Heritage, says the public has a right to access the buildings on the UNESCO list, especially since the Belgian government has already spent more than a million euros on the building’s upkeep. So Persoons passed a law that would require the family to open the house to the public for around 15 days a year, with the city government covering all related costs.
Even so, some of my family—who see themselves as guardians of the building—oppose the opening, worrying that a stream of visitors would risk damaging the artworks, furniture, and paintings inside. “I am dead against opening the house as a museum,” says Philippe. “It was built as a family home, and it will not support the traffic of hundreds of people’s visits.” Instead, he suggests it should be open only to small groups. The family has even taken legal action to challenge the building’s UNESCO status. However, the new law opening up the palais will come into effect on January 1, 2025, with Persoons insisting that “strict visiting conditions will be developed.”
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin once likened Le Palais Stoclet to a protective shell, a “dream house,” that shielded my family from the outside world. Its façade is clad in Norwegian marble, which blends in with Brussels’s gray sky. Four nude sculptures by Franz Metzner stand atop the exterior tower like guards.
You enter the home through a series of square columns and geometric motifs. Rooms extend from a central axis. An ornate hall leads to the dining room, featuring Gustav Klimt’s six-meter-long mosaic friezes, adorned with semi-precious stones. The house’s interior surfaces are made of Italian Paonazzo marble, ebony, and gold leaf. Art Deco chairs are upholstered in reindeer skin. The rooms flow gracefully into the manicured garden.
Adolphe, who made his fortune in finance and mining, and Suzanne were known to be welcoming and warm hosts. For years, they used the home to showcase their large art collection, of which they themselves were a significant part: “It was self-evident,” wrote the art historian Edmond de Bruyn, “that the floral decoration of the house—always kept in one color tone—and the neckties of Monsieur Stoclet matched Madame’s dress.” Their guest book was filled with the signatures of renowned artists, including the poet Jean Cocteau, the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, the pianist Joseph Alfidi, and the French actor Sacha Guitry.
Walter Benjamin once likened Le Palais Stoclet to a protective shell, a “dream house.”
Adolphe and Suzanne died just two weeks apart, in 1949, and left the home to their three children, Raymonde, Jacques, and René, who created a shareholders’ association called Compagnie Immobilière S.A.S. (Suzanne Adolphe Stoclet), aimed at preserving the house unchanged. René passed away and Raymonde didn’t want to live there—the cost of upkeep, maintenance, and heating was prohibitive—but Jacques and his wife, Annie, did, and Annie continued to bring new life to the house by organizing public concerts there with avant-garde composers such as John Adams and John Cage. So strong was the allure of the property to artists that in 1992, when the Belgian curator Martine Caeymaex asked the artist David Hockney what he wished to see during a trip to Brussels, he sent her a fax with only one word: “STOCLET.”
The house became a Belgian landmark in 1976, but there were still worries that the Wiener Werkstätte contents—work by the school of design Hoffman started—might be split up. Philippe often told me of his fears that a “Russian oligarch or Arab sheikh” might offer to buy the house. Ronald Lauder is just one of several billionaires who have made unsuccessful offers to buy the palais, the value of which is estimated at more than $130 million.
When Annie passed away, in 2002, it marked the end of an era. She was the last family member to live there full-time. Some of the artworks were auctioned off, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, acquiring a Duccio Madonna from the estate for $45 million, making it the Met’s most expensive purchase at that time.
But when, in 2005, three out of four of Adolphe’s granddaughters wanted to sell off nearly 300 of the palais’s items, the Belgian government swooped in and listed the palais’s decorations as an integral part of the building itself. The sisters appealed this decision, arguing that claiming their property without compensation was unjust. They lost when the fourth sister, Aude, proposed that a foundation should manage it and keep it as a “total work of art.”
The grandeur of Le Palais Stoclet often overshadows what was its primary purpose—to bring a family together. But in the inter-familial fights, and the long-running battle with the government, it has done just the opposite. Can the value of a home be found in the contents, or in the lives lived within it?
Natalie Stoclet is a writer, editor, and designer who divides her time between Mexico City and New York City
