Willem Hiele

See the North Sea in Ostend, walk along a canal, and there, in the middle of a polder, stands not a blockhouse, but a manifesto house. A brutalist brick building, both austere and magnetic, designed in 1974 by Jacques Moeschal (pronounced Mouskal) as a showcase for an art collector. De Keignaert (the name of the house) now stands like a reddish-brown island in a sea of green, open to the pearly sky of Flanders. Willem Hiele instantly recognized this place as the obvious choice. After ten years spent cooking in his ancestors' house in Koksijde, which had become too small to contain his ambitions, he found here the air, space, and coherence he was looking for. Without changing almost anything, he embraced the volumes, extended the spirit, installed an XXL kitchen open to part of the dining room, and designed the bedrooms as a natural extension of the place. Surrounding the house are eight hectares of fertile land, a patient ecosystem, neighboring producers, and opportunities for foraging and fishing. At the table, the cuisine is raw and sensitive, instinctive and deeply technical, evoking memories (its utterly nostalgic shrimp bisque served with a slice of buttered toast covered with a thick layer of gray shrimp, just like the one his grandmother used to make him!!!!) as much as the landscape. The house thus becomes a mirror of the chef: radical, generous, and lived-in. Especially when the chef gets behind the turntables and turns up the volume...