Curated Itinerary
Art Nouveau in Brussels: A Walk from Tassel to the Horta Museum
Six houses in Ixelles and Saint-Gilles: the Hôtel Tassel, the Hôtel Otlet, the Hôtel Winssinger, the Hankar House, the Hôtel Ciamberlani and the Horta Museum.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Hotel Tassel to Musée Horta, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
Brussels is where Art Nouveau began, and the evidence is in a handful of streets in Ixelles and Saint-Gilles. Six houses, all within a kilometre, built between 1893 and 1901.
What you see
The walk starts at the Hôtel Tassel (Victor Horta, 1893), the first townhouse to put an exposed iron skeleton into a domestic interior, and ends at Horta’s own house and studio, the Horta Museum (1898–1901).
In between: the Hôtel Otlet by Octave van Rysselberghe (1894–1898), the Hôtel Winssinger (1894–1897), which Horta himself converted into flats in 1928–29, and on rue Defacqz Paul Hankar’s own house (1893) with the Hôtel Ciamberlani (1897), where the iron beam is left frankly on show.
How to do it
On foot, six stops, 3.2 kilometres measured on the streets, about three hours. The Horta Museum can be visited; the others are private houses seen from the street.
When to go
Weekday afternoons. The Horta Museum needs a booking and closes on Mondays.
Read the article
The magazine has a longer piece on this walk, with a photograph of each building and the history behind it: Art Nouveau in Brussels, from the Hôtel Tassel to the Horta Museum.
Step by step
Hotel Tassel
The house that launched Art Nouveau. Victor Horta completed this radical private townhouse in 1894, introducing an exposed iron skeleton and sinuous ornament…
Hôtel Otlet, Brussels
The town house of the man who tried to index all the world’s knowledge — built with the same patient order.
Hôtel Winssinger, Brussels
Few buildings let you watch an architect edit his own youth: Victor Horta built the Hôtel Winssinger in the 1890s — and returned in 1928 to convert it into…
Hankar House (Maison Hankar), Brussels
In the same year, on neighbouring streets, two architects opened Brussels Art Nouveau. One was Horta. The other built this.
Hôtel Ciamberlani, Brussels
A house designed for a painter, where the front wall does what the rooms behind it ask — and nothing the rule book wants.
Musée Horta
Victor Horta built his own house and studio here between 1898 and 1901. Now the Musee Horta, it is the only one of his UNESCO-listed Brussels townhouses open…
Download for tour navigation
PDF is the stop list with GPS, to print or keep on the phone. GPX for Garmin / Komoot / OsmAnd. KML for Google Earth and Maps.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
To keep the route in the app instead of opening it once, download the KML above and import it into Google My Maps — Create a new map, then Import: the route then sits among your own maps in Google Maps, with the stops and our notes attached to each one.