Two houses on the corner of the rue de la Paille and the rue de Ruysbroeck, in one of the oldest streets of the Sablon quarter, renovated in the 1980s “after the old ordering” of their fronts to become a hotel. The Brussels heritage inventory records the renovation but not the age of the houses, and they have no protection. Today they are the 9Hotel Sablon.
At a glance
The rue de la Paille climbs from the rue de Ruysbroeck to the place du Grand Sablon. It is recorded in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, and its name, in use since at least the early eighteenth century, comes from the hay market held there, close to the horse market of the Sablon. The regional heritage inventory states that numbers 2 and 4, at the corner of the rue de Ruysbroeck, where number 2 is also rue de Ruysbroeck 27, were renovated in 1985–1987 by the architect J. Bolland, following the old ordering of the fronts, to house a hotel. It does not say when the houses were first built, and it gives them no notice of their own. The present hotel was redesigned by the Barcelona practice Castel Veciana Arquitectura.
Key facts
- Where: Rue de la Paille 2–4, corner of Rue de Ruysbroeck 27, 1000 Brussels (Sablon)
- Street: recorded in the first quarter of the fourteenth century; named after the hay market
- Buildings: older houses of unknown date, renovated in 1985–1987 by the architect J. Bolland “after the old ordering” to become a hotel, according to the regional inventory
- Interior design: Castel Veciana Arquitectura, according to the hotel
- Protection: none; the houses have no notice of their own in the inventory of the architectural heritage of the Brussels-Capital Region
- Current use: hotel, the 9Hotel Sablon, with 34 rooms according to the hotel
- Coordinates: 50.842278, 4.355639 · open in Google Maps
History
The rue de la Paille belongs to the old fabric of the Sablon. Its west side was long bordered by the cloister and college of the Jesuits, founded at the end of the sixteenth century; between 1816 and 1820 the architect F. Verly turned them into the Palace of Justice, and the line of the street was straightened. When that palace was demolished and the rue Lebeau cut through in 1891–1893, the site was used from 1895 for the central telephone exchange, later extended several times. The east side, where the hotel stands, kept a row of sober neoclassical houses of the first half of the nineteenth century: numbers 8 to 20 date from about 1820–1825, and numbers 26, 28, 30 and 32 from the years around 1825 to 1843.
The corner opens onto an even older street. The rue de Ruysbroeck, recorded in the thirteenth century, ran along the first city wall and took its name from the brook that flowed beside it. Its remaining houses are, in the words of the inventory, mostly of the traditional type in brick and sandstone, going back at least to the seventeenth century and remodelled in the nineteenth; next door to the hotel, number 29 is a gabled house dated 1735 by stones set in its front, restored in 1978 and entered on the legal inventory in 2024.
Numbers 2 and 4 of the rue de la Paille were photographed for the inventory around 1980, before their conversion. Between 1985 and 1987 the architect J. Bolland renovated them, following the old ordering of their fronts, to accommodate a hotel. The inventory does not record whether the interiors or the structure of the old houses were kept. The hotel was later redesigned by Castel Veciana Arquitectura of Barcelona, whose interiors the hotel describes as those of an art collector’s apartment.
What you see
We have not found a free photograph of the houses, and the inventory does not describe their fronts beyond saying that they were renovated following the old ordering. What can be seen from the street is the corner itself: the rue de la Paille rising towards the Sablon, and on the rue de Ruysbroeck, next door, the brick gable of number 29 with its date of 1735.
Practical information
- The building is a hotel, the 9Hotel Sablon; the interiors are for guests.
- The corner can be seen from the street at any time; the rue de la Paille has stepped pavements in front of numbers 18 to 22.
- The houses have no heritage protection; what is described here is the history of the street and of the conversion.
Getting there
The rue de la Paille leads down from the place du Grand Sablon to the rue de Ruysbroeck, near the place de la Justice. Brussels-Central station is about ten minutes’ walk away, and the trams on the rue de la Régence stop at the Petit Sablon, a few minutes to the south.
Nearby
- Maison Frison, Victor Horta’s house on the rue Lebeau, about 120 metres to the west.
- Church of Our Lady of Victories at the Sablon, about 230 metres to the south-west.
- La Pharmacie Anglaise and the Old England Building on the Mont des Arts, about 200 metres to the east.
Do you know more?
On this page we have published what the Brussels heritage inventory records about this corner. We have no photograph of the houses we are free to publish, and we could not find when they were first built, who lived in them, or how much of the old houses survived the conversion of 1985–1987. If you know something — a date, the people who lived here, an old photograph of the corner before the hotel, a document, a book that mentions it — or if you can send us a photograph of the building, write to Sofia, who looks after these pages.
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Please start your message with the title of this page, so it reaches the right file. Every contribution is checked against independent sources before it goes on the page, and we always say where a piece of information came from.
Sources
- Brussels-Capital Region, Inventaire du patrimoine architectural, street notice «Rue de la Paille» (research 1989–1994): the history and name of the street, the Jesuit college, Palace of Justice and telephone exchange, the neoclassical row on the east side, and the renovation of numbers 2 and 4 in 1985–1987 by J. Bolland to house a hotel.
- Brussels-Capital Region, Inventaire du patrimoine architectural, street notice «Rue de Ruysbroeck»: the thirteenth-century street, the brook and the first city wall, the traditional houses.
- Brussels-Capital Region, Inventaire du patrimoine architectural, notice «Rue de Ruysbroeck 29»: house dated 1735, restored in 1978 by A. De Prêter, legal inventory 19 August 2024.
- 9Hotel Sablon, official website: address, 34 rooms, interiors by Castel Veciana Arquitectura.
- OpenStreetMap / Nominatim: position, returned as 2, Rue de la Paille – Strostraat, Sablon, Bruxelles.
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