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House S-D in Mol, Belgium, turns a retirement brief into a sharply modern house. Dhoore Vanweert Architecten designed the private residence for Georges and Roza as a mostly single-level home where they could remain for as long as possible, while still giving them daylight, garden views, flexible rooms and a memorable presence on an ordinary postwar suburban street.
Its most revealing move is at the street: a guarded screen of textured glass, raw concrete and polished aluminum hides the main garden and makes the entrance difficult to read. Inside, the house opens dramatically toward that garden through full-height sliding glass. The contrast—privacy outside, openness within—organizes almost every decision in the project.
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| Item | What is documented |
|---|---|
| Location | Mol, Belgium |
| Architect | Dhoore Vanweert Architecten; Jan Vanweert and Kristof Mariën |
| Program | Private house |
| Clients | Georges and Roza; surname not published |
| Area | 2,560 square feet, as reported by Architectural Record in 2025 |
| Completion | December 2022 |
| Construction period | Five years, according to the 2025 project report |
| Cost | Withheld; the report says the price doubled during construction |
| Landscape architect | PUUR Groen |
| Contractor | Bouwwerken Verbraeken |
The practice’s project page identifies House S-D as a private house in Mol. The detailed account appears in Architectural Record’s 2025 residential-architecture coverage, which also supplies the area, completion date, dimensions and construction history.
Why the brief focused on staying at home
Georges and Roza were approaching retirement when they bought a dilapidated 1960s property on a plot they valued. They intended to replace the existing house rather than renovate it. Georges had noticed another Dhoore Vanweert project while cycling in nearby Aarschot and contacted the practice.
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Their request combined practical and emotional goals. They wanted a largely single-level arrangement near the town center, an open plan, abundant daylight and useful accommodation for later life. They also wanted a house with a distinct identity rather than another anonymous suburban replacement. Jan Vanweert recalls that the couple “asked for a house that would stand out.”
The clients described the long-term objective plainly: “whatever happened, we could stay in our home as long as possible.” The finished design responds with daily living concentrated on the ground floor, short routes between the principal rooms and few structural walls that would make future changes difficult. That is an architectural strategy for aging in place, not a clinical accessibility certification; no independent accessibility study is reported.
A defensive street facade and a garden turned toward the sun
The surrounding street is typical of Belgium’s postwar suburbs, with brick houses and pitched roofs. House S-D does not imitate that language. Its street elevation is composed of raw concrete, translucent textured glass, mirror-polished aluminum and one large, darkened circular window. There is no obvious front door.
The apparent impenetrability is deliberate rather than antisocial. The main garden occupies the southwest-facing street side, where it can receive useful afternoon and evening sun. Textured-glass panels conceal the garden while admitting diffuse light and movement. A side entrance provides the formal arrival, while a large gate cut into the screen offers a more direct route through the enclosure. Visitors therefore encounter two degrees of arrival: a conventional hall and a shortcut that immediately reveals the interior landscape.
That arrangement resolves a difficult suburban trade-off. A fully glazed street front would expose the garden and living spaces, while a blank wall would sacrifice light and connection. House S-D keeps the street edge visually controlled and reserves clear, transparent openings for the rooms facing the garden.
How the ground floor is organized
Entry hall and seasonal threshold
The entrance hall contains built-in coat closets and a guest bathroom before leading toward the rear of the house. A pivoting metal door separates the hall from the principal living zone. Its large circular window repeats the geometric motif already visible on the facade.
The door also has a simple environmental role. Georges and Roza leave it open in summer, when they want the hall and living area to read as one space, and close it in winter to retain warmth. The detail makes the threshold adjustable instead of treating the entrance as a permanently sealed boundary.
One connected living space
Beyond the pivot door, a central open area links the corridor to the stair, the kitchen and dining room, and the living room. The plan avoids a sequence of narrow, enclosed rooms. Sightlines run diagonally across the interior, helping a compact footprint feel larger than its measured area.
Floor-to-ceiling sliding glass opens the living area to the front garden and patio. When the panels are open, the bluestone floor continues visually—and physically—from the interior into the yard. A circular window in the kitchen provides another outward view without turning the room into a fully transparent box.
Bedroom, bathroom and rear patio
The couple’s bedroom and bathroom face the main garden and also connect to a smaller patio at the rear. Georges’s desk sits near that rear patio, giving him a work surface beside another outdoor outlook rather than in a separated office wing. The arrangement keeps the rooms used every day on one level while providing more than one direction of light and air.
Cellar and guest level
A spiral stair descends to a generous cellar and rises to two guest bedrooms and a small bathroom. The upper floor was added at the architects’ suggestion to improve the property’s resale value and to give the couple’s granddaughters a place to stay. It is not the center of the retirement plan; the clients’ essential rooms remain below.
The guest volume is described as a mirrored cube, a compact object set above the more expansive ground-floor composition. In the bathroom, a skylight continues the circular theme, bringing daylight from above while echoing the round openings elsewhere in the house.
The geometry: a 62-foot square and an almost four-foot grid
The house and its principal outdoor spaces fit within an approximately 62-foot square. Inside that envelope, the architects divided the plan according to a nearly four-foot grid. The dimensions are project-specific, not a universal planning standard.
The grid does not produce a rigid checkerboard. The report describes shifts in both plan and facade where the square boundary and the interior module meet. Those offsets create changing views, angled relationships between rooms and a street elevation that feels composed rather than repetitive.
For the clients, the grid had a less visible but important consequence: it supported a structure with very few internal load-bearing walls. Rooms can therefore be adapted more readily if mobility, care needs or household patterns change. The house’s flexibility comes from the combination of a clear module and a deliberately limited structural core, rather than from leaving every room undefined.
Structure and the material palette
Perimeter concrete instead of a forest of columns
The concrete-slab roof is carried mostly by in-situ cast-concrete perimeter panels reported as four feet wide. Only three internal load-bearing masonry elements interrupt the open arrangement. This structure lets the living areas flow together and keeps future partitions from being dictated by a dense line of supports.
The perimeter panels also make the facade’s heavy appearance functional. Concrete, glass and aluminum are not applied as a decorative skin over an unrelated frame; they express the way the roof and enclosure are assembled.
Stone that extends the interior outdoors
Two-foot-square bluestone slabs cover the principal floor and continue out to the yard. The repeated module reinforces the house’s geometric order while making the garden feel like an extension of the living room. Larger bluestone panels appear in the bathroom and around Georges’s desk, where a different scale marks more intimate or focused areas.
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Cabinetry, glass and metal accents
Olive-stained timber cabinetry warms the concrete and stone. The kitchen island is clad in book-matched green quartzite, whose mirrored veining turns a necessary work surface into a central visual element. A translucent Plexiglas closet adds a softer, glowing volume inside the otherwise hard-edged palette.
Outside, the bike shed is clad in brushed aluminum and supports the cantilevering carport roof. The combination of practical storage and a floating canopy keeps secondary elements within the same material and structural vocabulary as the main house.
Privacy, daylight and the meaning of a “glass house”
Roza says, “I always wanted a glass house,” explaining that she wanted “to see the seasons and have plentiful daylight in winter.” House S-D interprets that wish selectively. The living room, bedroom and bathroom receive broad garden-facing glazing, but the street side uses textured rather than clear glass, along with concrete and aluminum.
This is not a transparent pavilion placed indiscriminately on a suburban lot. It is a layered sequence: filtered light at the public edge, a protected garden immediately behind it, and clear sliding glass where the occupants control the relationship with their own outdoor space. The result offers visual openness without making every domestic activity part of the street scene.
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House S-D’s dimensions are modest compared with its visual effect. The connected central plan removes many interruptions, while diagonal views cross the kitchen, dining area, living room and garden. Circular openings punctuate the otherwise orthogonal geometry, and the floor material runs across the threshold to erase a conventional boundary.
Daylight arrives from several directions: the southwest garden facade, the rear patio, the kitchen window and the upper bathroom skylight. Because these openings are not all on one axis, the interior changes as the day moves rather than relying on one large picture window.
Georges describes the lived result this way: “there’s such a sensation of space. We don’t need to travel as much anymore—we’re so happy at home.” His comment describes the house as an everyday environment, not simply as a visual object photographed from outside.
Construction timeline and what is—and is not—known about cost
Architectural Record reports that construction took five years and was completed in December 2022. The project account attributes the extended schedule to Covid and the war in Ukraine, and says those disruptions doubled the price. It does not publish either the original estimate or the final amount, so no reliable project cost can be stated.
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Project credits and published context
Dhoore Vanweert Architecten is credited as architect, with Jan Vanweert and Kristof Mariën named for the practice. PUUR Groen is the landscape architect and Bouwwerken Verbraeken the contractor. The client’s surname is not published. Tim Van de Velde is credited for the project images on the practice’s project listing.
The Architectural Record credits also list SWF Metalworks for cladding panels; Jansen and SWF Metalworks for windows and doors; Jacobs Interieur and Atelier des Amis for furnishings; and Corstjens and iGuzzini for lighting. Those credits identify project contributors, not necessarily retail product models available to homeowners.
An October 2025 article in Abitare mentions Swan chairs by Arne Jacobsen for Fritz Hansen in its account of the villa. That furnishing detail belongs specifically to Abitare’s report and is incidental to the architectural strategy.
Why House S-D stands out
House S-D is distinctive because its modernism is tied to ordinary domestic decisions. The guarded facade protects a southwest garden; the side gate makes arrival practical; the open plan supports daily life on one level; and the sparse structural supports leave room for change. Concrete, textured glass, aluminum, stone and timber are composed into a house that is both private from the street and expansive toward its own landscape.
The project does not promise that architecture alone can solve every challenge of aging. It shows something more precise: a retirement home can be planned around continuity, daylight and adaptability without becoming an institutional-looking bungalow. In Mol, Dhoore Vanweert Architecten gave Georges and Roza a house prepared for a longer life, and gave a familiar suburban street an unmistakably modern counterpoint.
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