Tweestroom Architecten Turns a 19th-Century Canning Factory in Leuven into a Co-Working Space

Belgium's first canning factory was founded in 1886 by engineer Edmond Thumas along the Vaart, a lateral canal north of Leuven that had served as a transport artery since 1752. The factory shut down in 1977, and the building sat largely dormant for decades, awaiting a major renovation that never quite arrived. In the interim, a collective of creatives moved in. Tweestroom Architecten, part of that collective, carved out a 100-square-meter co-working space on one of the building's four floors, working almost exclusively with materials they pulled from the site itself.

What makes the Marie Thumas Workplace genuinely interesting is not the usual adaptive reuse pitch of "preserving character." It is the discipline of the constraint. Because the occupation is temporary and the building awaits its larger renovation, every non-essential component had to be removable. Nothing could be permanently fixed. That limitation forced Tweestroom to think of the interior as a reversible assembly: salvaged glass panels overlap rather than seal, pine planks sit atop the original factory drainage floor rather than replace it, and aluminum door frames slot in without welding to the concrete skeleton. The result is a workplace that feels resolved and warm, yet could, in theory, be disassembled and returned to the raw shell it started from.

The Factory Shell as Protagonist

The building's concrete skeleton, infilled with brick masonry, reads clearly from the outside. Painted signage on the brick facade still announces the factory's former life, and the canal-side elevation, clad in white, sits quietly across the water next to a moored barge. Tweestroom chose not to compete with any of this. No new exterior signage, no flashy entrance. You walk in through existing openings and encounter the same industrial logic inside: exposed concrete beams, yellow-painted gas conduits overhead, green-coded electrical runs.

The color palette of the intervention follows the building's own functional coding system. Yellow marks gas, green marks electricity. Rather than stripping these utilitarian layers to impose a neutral backdrop, the architects let them set the tone. It is a small decision, but it reveals the project's core conviction: the factory knows what it is, and the workplace should honor that knowledge.

Salvaged Glass and the Meeting Room Wall

The meeting room is defined by a wall of oversized smoked glass panels found on site. Because they were salvaged, their dimensions were fixed; the architects could not order them to spec. The panels overlap at the joints, producing a translucent enclosure that filters warm afternoon light into soft amber tones. A black marble column stands at the threshold, framing the transition between the open workspace and the enclosed room.

There is a productive tension in this detail. Smoked glass typically reads as corporate and controlled, but here the overlaps, the slight imperfections, and the fact that you can see shadows and movement through the panels give the wall an almost textile quality. It separates without isolating. The meeting room feels private enough for a call, open enough that you never forget you are inside a factory.

Material Reuse as a Design Method

Tweestroom's material strategy operates at every scale. Reclaimed marble appears as inset strips in the chevron-patterned timber floor, as wall panels flanking a new aluminum door handle, and as a finish on the existing brick wall around the co-working desks. The marble is not deployed for luxury signaling; it is deployed because it was there. The same logic governs the pine planks that level the factory's original sloped drainage floor and simultaneously improve the room's acoustics.

The custom door handle, a black cube mounted on white plaster between dark and light marble panels, is a satisfying example of how restraint can produce refinement. Aluminum was one of the few genuinely new materials introduced, reserved exclusively for the door and its hardware. Everything else was secondhand, found, or already in place. The hierarchy is clear: new material enters only where function demands it.

Softening the Shell with Textiles and Oak

The raw concrete and brick would be oppressive without counterpoint. Tweestroom introduces warmth through two channels: natural linen curtains in blue and red panels that frame the tall factory windows, and vertical oak slat walls that line the living room zone. The curtains do triple duty: they diffuse harsh daylight, they soften acoustics, and they inject color into a space whose hard surfaces are uniformly grey and brown.

The living room, with its white sofa set against the oak slat wall, feels genuinely domestic. Potted plants cluster beside tall windows. A sheer curtain drifts at the edge of the frame. It is a deliberate contrast to the co-working zone a few meters away, and it works because the transition is not gradual but abrupt. You move from exposed ceiling beams and white desks directly into warm oak and soft upholstery. The factory's scale absorbs both moods without strain.

The Workspace and Kitchen

The open office area occupies the building's longest run, with white desks arranged beneath exposed concrete beams and hanging plants that trail from the ceiling grid. It is straightforward and unpretentious. The air-blasted concrete ceiling, stripped of its old paint to reveal the raw aggregate beneath, provides enough visual texture that the room needs very little else.

The kitchen continues the project's material logic. A secondhand stainless steel unit sits below a textured glass window, its countertop fitted with an inset sink basin. A striped fabric skirt conceals storage below, picking up the textile language of the curtains elsewhere. The aluminum details link back to the door hardware. Every element refers to something already established in the space, and nothing feels added on.

Details That Carry the Argument

A round dining table appears in multiple configurations throughout the space. Its top is warm oak; its edge reveals a concrete detail that rhymes with the building's structure. A blue glass tumbler sits beside it in one shot, a suspended linear light fixture hangs above it in another. The table feels like a piece of furniture designed specifically for this building, because it was. Tweestroom fabricated the coffee table, couch, and acoustic panels from reclaimed oak, treating each piece as part of the architecture rather than an afterthought.

Gradient curtains behind one chair dissolve daylight into bands of color. The concrete soffit above remains untouched. These moments, where a carefully chosen object meets an unaltered industrial surface, are where the project is most convincing. The argument is not that old buildings need saving. The argument is that old buildings have already done most of the design work, and a good architect knows when to stop.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan confirms what the photographs suggest: a linear sequence of rooms running from private areas through the kitchen to the lounge and co-working zones. The 100-square-meter footprint is modest, and the plan makes the most of it by aligning circulation along one edge, leaving each room free to occupy the full width of the floor plate. Doorways punch through the existing brick walls rather than the concrete frame, preserving the structural logic while creating visual depth through a long enfilade of framed views.

Why This Project Matters

The Marie Thumas Workplace is not a permanent renovation. It is a temporary occupation, and that is precisely what makes it valuable as a precedent. Tweestroom Architecten demonstrates that a rigorous design sensibility can operate under severe constraints: no permanent fixings, no new structural work, almost no new materials. The result is not a rough-and-ready squat aesthetic but a carefully composed interior that holds its own against projects with ten times the budget.

For architects working in cities full of underused industrial buildings, this project offers a practical and philosophically coherent model. Do not wait for the master plan. Do not strip the building back to a blank canvas. Work with what is already there, make it removable, and trust that the building's own history will carry the design. The Vaart canal brought goods to this factory for a century. Now the factory itself is the material.

Marie Thumas Workplace by Tweestroom Architecten. Located in Leuven, Belgium. 100 m². Completed in 2024. Photography by Nick Claeskens and Tweestroom Architecten.

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