The Antwerp hotel that stays for friends

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Twenty-one rooms in two 16th-century townhouses off Groenplaats. Bea Mombaers and Peter Ivens have spent a year making the place quieter, warmer, more like a friend’s house. The cathedral is two streets away.

Mouche Van Hool opened Hotel Julien in 2004, when boutique still meant something in Antwerp. The Dries Van Noten years, the height of the Royal Academy graduates. People came for the shows and stayed in apartments. Van Hool wanted to give them a hotel that felt like an apartment, which is not the same as an apartment, and the difference is harder to design than it sounds.

Twenty-two years on, she has called in two of the city’s most quietly admired names to bring the hotel back to its first idea. Bea Mombaers does interiors. Peter Ivens does architecture. They have worked together for fifteen years and Hotel Julien is their first hotel.

The makeover

Nothing was moved. The layout of the two townhouses stays as it was. The fireplaces, the beams, the cornicing all remain. What changed is the texture: wool, stone, timber in the public rooms; linen, marble, timber upstairs. Custom furniture for reception, lounge, bar and breakfast room, made for these spaces and no others.

In the lounge, painted wood panelling runs low along the walls and stops before it can become wainscoting. Steel-framed doors open onto the courtyard. The lighting, by Beirut studio PS Lab, is kept deliberately low. You notice the texture of plaster, the grain of timber, the weight of linen before you notice anything else.

The bar and the cellar

The bar is small and dim, with restored wood throughout. The list runs to classic cocktails, vintage wines, local beers including De Koninck from the brewery a fifteen-minute walk away in Zuid. By eight in the evening it fills with guests who have come down for one drink before dinner and stay for three.

The spa sits below ground in what was once the cellar, the vaulted ceiling untouched. Sauna, hammam, hot stone seat. You book it for private use, so it is yours for an hour, which is the correct way to use a hotel spa and almost no hotel does it.

Up on the roof, a terrace looks across the Old Town to the Cathedral of Our Lady. Pieter Bruegel saw it under construction. You see it finished, more or less, depending on which spire is being restored that decade.

The rooms

Twenty-one in total. Materials hold steady across the house, linen and marble and timber, but the architecture shifts. The Dreamer and Experience rooms tuck under original beamed ceilings in the eaves; they are the quieter category, the ones to ask for when fashion week is on in Brussels or Paris and you want a small distance from things. The Experience Terrace rooms add a piece of private outdoor space above the city.

Books on Belgian design sit on the bedside tables, and ceramics by Vincent Van Duysen for Serax sit on the shelves. The bathrooms hold Aesop. Mornings begin in the breakfast room with pastries from Dôme, the patisserie in Zurenborg that has spent twenty-five years perfecting the Belgian habit of eating something laminated before nine.

The verdict

Antwerp does not have a hotel with the gravity of the Connaught or the wattage of the Bulgari, and that is the point. Hotel Julien sits in the city as the city sits in the country, low and confident and unwilling to perform. The redesign has not changed what it is. It has made it more so.

Book the Experience Terrace if you can. Otherwise ask for a Dreamer and stay in the eaves. Walk the ten minutes to MoMu before everyone else is up.

The Splendid Edit visited Hotel Julien shortly after its reopening in May 2026. Rates from approximately €280 per night. Book through hotel-julien.com.

Photography courtesy of Hotel Julien — additional images by Sofia de la Cruz for Wallpaper*