This week’s travel dream: Northern Europe’s unsung design haven

Flanders, Belgium’s Dutch-speaking northern region, stealthily harbors some of the best design in Europe, said Heather Smith MacIsaac in Travel + Leisure. I first experienced Belgium’s “wonderful oddness” four years ago in Brussels, Flanders’s capital. But that city’s flirtations with “avant-garde stylishness” feel overwhelmed by a “peculiar hybrid of international bland and haute guildhall.” A hunch told me that a purer form of Belgian style might be glimpsed if I undertook a tour of Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges—three northern Flemish cities that are separated by less than 60 miles.

My theory proved true as soon as my train pulled into Antwerp Central Station. Recently, “a bold new gridded superstructure” has been added to the “glorious cathedral” of the original, turn-of-the-20th-century station. “The contrast was revelatory”—just one example of the mix of “deep tradition and smart modernity that I would see again and again the next few days.” The Flemish also have a knack for taking a small space and “transforming it into a sanctuary,” as can be seen in the influential work of designer Axel Vervoordt. Seek out Vervoordt’s namesake art gallery and nearby you’ll find two restaurants he also designed—including the Sir Anthony Van Dijck, where the “roughly plastered walls” and “worn stone floors” still look current 30 years after they were unveiled. A taste of the style’s roots can be found at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, whose “deeply atmospheric rooms” are works of art in themselves.

In medieval Ghent, I admired masterpieces of Belgian furniture-making at the Design Museum Ghent and “stood in rapture” before the 12-panel altarpiece at St. Bavo Cathedral. Then a half-hour train ride brought me to tourist-heavy Bruges. The city’s “schizophrenia” amazed me. It felt like a seamless transition to wander from “low-ceilinged rooms” and “cobblestoned courts” to an interior-design shop that mixed Asian artifacts with leather, zinc, and blooming branches. Flanders, I decided, was “the land of under-promise and over-delivery.” You could complain that it’s a lesser European destination, but only if you’re not truly looking.

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At the Hotel Verhaegen, a B&B in Ghent (hotelverhaegen.be), rooms start at $244.