Edouard Brunet Turns Forgotten Brussels Attics into a Light-Filled Duplex Built from Salvaged Materials

Most Brussels apartment buildings carry a genetic code: three rooms in enfilade, repeated floor after floor, with unused attics gathering dust above the top landing. At the JEDA Apartment, Edouard Brunet Architecte, working alongside architect Julie Duchateau, broke open that genetic code by colonizing the roof. They removed walls and floors on the upper level, exposed the timber frame, pushed insulation to the outside of the structure to gain every possible cubic centimeter, and threaded a vertical visual axis from the third-floor entrance all the way up to fifth-floor skylights. The result is a 140 square meter duplex that reads less like a renovation and more like a slow archaeological dig through the building's own biography.

What makes this project genuinely interesting is not the spatial ambition but the material ethics. Bricks from demolitions were reused to raise new partitions. Floorboards were salvaged from a neighbor's apartment downstairs to patch the areas where walls had been removed. Marble wall coverings from Brussels North Station became kitchen and bathroom worktops. Even a faded painted advertisement, predating the building itself, was left exposed as a kind of accidental fresco. Nothing here was sourced from a catalog when it could be sourced from the site or the neighborhood.

Light from Above

The architects oriented the living spaces at the very top of the building, a counterintuitive move that sacrifices convenience for drama. A large glass roof on the south slope and skylights on both north and south faces flood the upper volume with homogeneous, almost diffuse daylight. The white-painted timber rafters amplify this effect, bouncing light across every surface. The vertical atrium, visible from below through stair openings, pulls that light downward through the section, so even the lower bedroom floor benefits from borrowed brightness.

Placing insulation outside the structure was critical here. It allowed the roof frame to remain fully exposed inside, turning an engineering necessity into the apartment's defining spatial character. The pitched ceiling, with its rhythm of rafters, gives the living level the proportions of a small nave rather than a cramped attic.

Salvaged Surfaces

The exposed brick walls are not a decorative choice. They are the literal material record of the building, whitewashed in some places, left raw in others, carrying traces of previous partitions and former paint layers. The faded advertisement visible in the bedroom corner is perhaps the most evocative element: a ghost sign from before the building was even constructed, now framed like a painting. It would have been easier and cheaper to plaster over it. Leaving it exposed is a statement about what renovation should preserve.

The marble worktops from Brussels North Station bring a public scale into a domestic interior. These are not delicate slabs cut for a kitchen; they carry the weight and wear of a transit hall. Against the salvaged brick and reclaimed timber floors, they ground the space in a material honesty that no showroom finish could replicate.

The Kitchen as Spine

A long furniture piece runs through the upper floor, absorbing the office, storage, and kitchen into a single continuous element. The massive central island, topped with that salvaged marble, anchors the open plan without subdividing it. Fluted panel details and integrated shelving keep the cabinetry from reading as generic built-ins. Above it all, the white-painted coffered ceiling and colorful bunting give the kitchen the atmosphere of a lived-in workshop rather than a polished showroom.

Climbing vines along the brick walls and hanging plants near the skylights blur the boundary between interior and the rooftop garden above. The architects clearly understood that a kitchen at the top of a building, under glass, would inevitably become a greenhouse. They leaned into that tendency instead of fighting it.

A Bench in the Sun

One of the most quietly radical moves is the built-in bench beneath the south-facing glass roof. It is a piece of furniture designed around a climate strategy: the sloped glazing traps warmth, the brick wall behind stores it, and the bench invites occupation. A cat lounging in a shaft of sunlight confirms the success of the idea more convincingly than any thermal simulation could. The design acknowledges that passive solar gain is not just an energy metric; it is a sensory experience worth designing for.

The Vertical Thread

The staircase is the connective tissue of the duplex. White-painted turned balusters hint at the building's original character, while the built-in bookshelves at the landing transform a circulation space into a small library. Removable steps near the top give access to the terrace, a detail that treats the boundary between inside and outside as permeable rather than fixed. Looking up through the stairwell, the layering of timber ceilings, foliage, and skylights creates a telescoping depth that makes the apartment feel far larger than its 140 square meters.

The Lower Floor: Bedrooms and Thresholds

Water and technical rooms are grouped in a central block on the fourth floor, freeing the rooms along the facades for bedrooms and a playroom. Grey sliding panels and timber-edged thresholds create a sequence of compressed corridors that open into bright rooms beyond, a classic enfilade reinterpreted with modern detailing. One narrow bedroom uses a blue accent wall and a yellow curtain to define zones within a minimal footprint, proving that color can do the spatial work that walls cannot.

The bathroom, with its black vanity set against raw brick and lit by a vertical strip light, manages to feel both austere and warm. Nearby, a workspace tucks against a weathered brick wall with climbing plants and hanging pots, treating the desk as another threshold between domestic life and the building's wild, green upper layer.

Rooftop Ecology

The flat roof is not a leftover surface; it is a living space. Timber decking, raised planter beds, a vegetable garden, and sunflowers transform the formerly lifeless roof into a productive landscape that attracts bees, ladybugs, beetles, and birds. The timber-clad pavilion at one end, with floor-to-ceiling glazed doors, acts as a threshold between the interior living rooms and this rooftop ecosystem. At dusk, with the Brussels skyline behind and the garden in the foreground, the terrace feels like a private belvedere.

The rooftop extension reads modestly from the street: dark vertical cladding and a restrained profile that defers to the existing dormers and chimneys. From within, though, it opens generously. The library with its removable steps becomes a kind of hatch between the intellectual life of the interior and the ecological life of the roof. It is a detail that captures the project's broader ambition: to make the building's abandoned spaces not just habitable but alive.

Plans and Drawings

The section sketch reveals the full vertical strategy: three levels threaded by the stair, with the pitched roof forms generating a series of double-height and compressed spaces. The axonometric drawings show how the rooftop volume, with its chimney stacks and glazed openings, mediates between the existing building mass and the new outdoor terrace. What reads as informal and organic in photographs is, in section, a carefully calibrated sequence of volumes.

Why This Project Matters

The JEDA Apartment matters because it treats renovation as an act of material archaeology rather than demolition. In a city where thousands of 20th century buildings sit with dead attics above their top floors, this project demonstrates that the vertical expansion of existing structures can be done without imported materials, without pastiche, and without erasing the traces of previous lives. Bricks from demolitions, floorboards from a neighbor, marble from a train station: the supply chain here is the neighborhood itself.

It also matters as a counterargument to the notion that sustainability and pleasure are at odds. The bench under the glass roof, the vegetable garden attracting pollinators, the climbing plants colonizing the workspace: these are not sacrifices made in the name of ecology. They are the rewards. Brunet and Duchateau have built an apartment that is warmer, brighter, and more alive precisely because it works with what was already there. That is the kind of intelligence that Brussels, and every other city built on repetitive 20th century housing stock, urgently needs.

JEDA Apartment by Edouard Brunet Architecte and Julie Duchateau. Brussels, Belgium. 140 m². Completed 2022. Photography by Edouard Brunet.

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