History

Hôtel Le Berger was created in 1933 on Rue du Berger in Ixelles, on a quiet side street near the Porte de Namur. According to the hotel's own published history, the entrepreneur Gabriel Duhoux "designed and build Le Berger" as a solution for a circle of friends who needed a discreet, comfortable place to spend time with their lovers. It functioned as a maison de rendez-vous: in the words of the French design magazine Maison à Part, "un lieu fréquenté par les couples illégitimes" — a venue for unmarried couples, deliberately kept separate from prostitution. The entire layout served discretion. As both the hotel and the Brussels guide À Goût de M'ma note, the two elevators were not placed side by side, so that guests entering and guests leaving never encountered one another: you came in by one door and elevator, and left by a different elevator and door.

The hotel operated in this role from the mid-1930s into the 2000s. Maison à Part records that it closed in December 2009, and that a renovation lasting more than two years preceded its reopening in 2012. The restoration was carried out by architect Olivia Gustot and interior decorator Martina Nievergelt, with project direction by Jean-Michel André; the team kept the building's structure and volumes unchanged and restored the Art Deco character of its fifty bedrooms, reusing period-appropriate details such as small bathroom tiles and 1940s-stock wallpapers with elaborate patterns. A second building was added at number 22 in 2013, expanding the hotel. The Brussels architectural heritage inventory (monument.heritage.brussels) documents neighbouring houses on Rue du Berger as Empire-style nineteenth-century buildings but does not list number 24 as a legally protected monument, so Le Berger is best described as a historic Art Deco building rather than a classified one.