“A derelict distillery becomes a canalside arts centre”

by Emma Crichton-Miller on apollo-magazine.com

On a grey day at the very end of November 2017, the Vervoordt company unveiled Kanaal, the latest instalment in the family business’s almost 50-year history. The company had bought the collection of impressive but derelict 19th-century brick industrial buildings, a former malting distillery, on the banks of the Albert Canal just outside Antwerp in 1998, moving in part of the firm a year later. But its founder, the influential interior designer, property developer and art dealer Axel Vervoordt, always had another vision for the site.

Nearly 20 years later, this ‘lost corner of the world’, as Boris Vervoordt puts it, has been reconfigured as the flagship centre of what has become a global empire. An intertwined residential, commercial and cultural district, it is a concrete, brick and glass expression of Axel Vervoordt’s much admired aesthetic, with its love of humble, industrial materials. It is also a testament to his ideas about the central place of art from across centuries and cultures in life. Boris Vervoordt says, ‘To express this grand scale in a new build, in a city centre, would be very pretentious. We are entitled to do grand things here because this land was a wasteland.’

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