With its rich artistic heritage, Belgium is fertile territory for art and design collectors, and two of them – Belgian architect Olivier Dwek and businessman Frédéric Hanrez – recently united to create a stunning new gallery space in Brussels. Called New Hope, it opened its doors during the Brafa Art Fair in January 2021. 

He devoured autobiographies of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, learned to draw nudes at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, then studied architecture at the Institut Victor Horta. He is a collector, too. ‘Art helped me to sharpen my eye,’ he states. At only 28, he was commissioned to refurbish Louis Vuitton’s Brussels store, and in 2000, he founded his own studio, creating light-filled, modernist-inspired homes for well-heeled clients, often curating the art and design within. 

Hanrez is a Belgian entrepreneur as discreet and low-key as Dwek is bold and exuberant. A scion of an illustrious Belgian family with a lifetime passion for collecting, Hanrez realised about 20 years ago that he could get more bang for his buck with design. ‘I prefer to have the best in design, rather than second best in painting,’ he says. Having spent part of his childhood in Wisconsin, he was attracted to the craft spirit of American design, and now owns one of the world’s finest private collections of American 20th-century furniture, notably from New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Hanrez commissioned Dwek, a friend, to come up with a new space for what he calls his ‘three-dimensional art’. They tore down the old structure, leaving the street façade, which the authorities also required be left intact. They then searched out extraordinary materials – black lava floor stones from Malta, Swiss-made floor-to-ceiling windows, and black ‘Kolumba’ bricks handmade by family firm Petersen Tegl in Denmark.

New Hope took nearly five years of construction. Though it measures only 550 sq m, it feels larger, thanks to plenty of natural light, a double-height ceiling and multiple levels. Out back, the parallel lines of the awning and patio wall frame the park’s mature trees like a painting.

Graphic black and white tones provide a neutral backdrop for the collections, with a dramatic dash of colour from a massive green marble wall. Dwek meticulously selected the stones so that the veins would create a mirror effect, like a two-way Rorschach inkblot (the green wall also makes a nod to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion).