A mysterious mansion, a family feud and a locked-away Klimt masterpiece

“I was watching the unopened letters from lawyers piling up," said Denis Derycke, Lo Buglio’s fellow design laboratory coordinator at the state-funded Free University of Brussels.

The missives came from attorneys for descendants of Adolphe Stoclet, an industrial magnate who around 1910 built a sumptuous mansion decorated with multicolor marble and an original Gustav Klimt frieze enveloping the dining room. Lo Buglio and his team were violating the family’s privacy and intellectual property rights, the lawyers said.

Never mind that nobody has lived in the Palais Stoclet for a generation. Even though all of Lo Buglio’s work was based on public records, Stoclet’s heirs sued to block the government-sponsored project.

“It really shocked us," said Ans Persoons, a Brussels politician leading the push for more public admiration of the landmark, which is listed by Unesco as a World Heritage site.

When Stoclet’s last immediate heir, daughter-in-law Anny, lived in the mansion late last century, she hosted concerts in its dark-marbled music room. A coterie of Brussels elite and art lovers could experience the property, dreamed up by Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art," filled with pricey collectibles.

“It was very warm," said Isabelle Leroy, an expert on national cultural heritage at Urban.Brussels, the city’s preservation office. She first visited the home in 1983, while in school, and recalls it as “sensual," adorned with luxurious carpets and assorted artworks. Among them was a medieval Madonna and Child now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Since Anny’s death in 2002, the next generation of descendants—seven heirs with eight legal representatives, according to city officials—has bickered over what to do with the faded showpiece. Some want to donate it to the state while others want to profit from it, officials said.

Family members remain mum. Attempts to contact them directly and through others proved fruitless.

Since Anny’s death, the family has forbidden almost anyone from entering the palace, aside from workers and a few experts. Benoît Cerexhe, mayor of the mansion’s district since 2013, said he has received no response to his invitations to meet the family. He has never set foot in his quarter’s most famous structure.

Particularly galling to authorities is that the family bars access despite receiving more than €1 million in public money to maintain the delicate monument since its Unesco designation in 2009. Funding has helped restore stones and metalwork on a balcony, kitchen lighting and a bathroom door, among other elements. Officials say the house is in good condition overall. Its white-marble facade, however, needs a cleaning after decades of rain dripping over copper in the building’s ornate metal trim tinted much of it green.

Under Belgian rules, any facility drawing more than €500,000 over a five-year period must open its doors to limited public viewing, at the government’s expense. The Stoclet family keeps its use of subsidies below the threshold, said Persoons.

A new tool should help Belgium pry open the mansion’s iron gates: A law passed earlier this year requires all Unesco-listed structures to open for state-funded visits during a few days annually.

A handful of Brussels buildings are on Unesco’s register. All but the Palais Stoclet already allow some access. Action on the law is pending following elections and protracted talks on forming a new government.

The man who would be responsible for managing eventual public access hopes the law will yield an amicable compromise. The government doesn’t want to be seen as forcing open a private home, said Thierry Wauters, Director of Cultural Heritage at Urban.Brussels.

Meanwhile, the public is already getting a virtual peek inside. Lo Buglio’s team finished its digital reconstruction last year and showed it in one of the city’s main museums through April. It is now on view in a city-center gallery.

The Stoclet project followed a similar reconstruction Lo Buglio’s team released in 2019 of an art nouveau civic center that was demolished in 1965, the House of the People. Officials from Urban.Brussels in 2020 asked Lo Buglio to create one of the Stoclet mansion.

“I thought great, I’ll finally have a chance to go inside," he recalled. “They said: No, no, no. Do it like the House of the People."

His team would get no access to the building and couldn’t even fly a drone over it. They had to work from archives and public records as if it no longer existed, he was told. Reams of documentation, including original plans and century-old contracts for materials, are in the public domain.

Still, the family objected. Its lawyers barraged Lo Buglio with demands to stop work. City officials told him to continue, under their legal protection. Despite that, he sweated.

“What if one of the sources we used wasn’t in the public domain?" Lo Buglio feared. Accidentally including a detail obtained outside the archives, from some private source, could scupper the project, he worried.

His attempts to seek input from the family fell flat, he said. Ultimately the two sides’ lawyers struck a deal allowing the digital video to proceed. And in the end, the public fight had an upside.

“Thanks to this, we got amazing media coverage," even before the video’s debut last year, said Derycke. “We cannot thank them enough."

Whenever access is ultimately allowed, Persoons said the mansion will be a hot ticket, following the public fight and the video.

“I would love to see it," she said. “And not only me."