Mouche Van Hool opened Hotel Julien in 2004 in two 16th-century town houses at Korte Nieuwstraat 24, a few minutes’ walk from the Groenplaats and the Grote Markt. It was one of the first boutique hotels in Antwerp’s old centre. Twenty-one years later she gave it a complete renovation, and the hotel reopened in April 2025 with the same 21 rooms and a very different interior.

Twenty-one rooms is a small number for a city this size. Antwerp had 75 hotels with 5,823 rooms in May 2024, according to figures VRT reported that December, up from 65 hotels and 4,946 rooms in 2019. Hotel Julien accounts for less than half a per cent of them, which is the point. Van Hool says she started it “with the idea of offering an intimate, welcoming place with a homely atmosphere”.

Two houses, one courtyard

The hotel began in one of the two houses and took over the second over the years. They are joined around a quiet inner courtyard, and the original fabric is still visible: fireplaces, beams and cornicing upstairs, high ceilings in the public rooms and, underneath, the vaulted cellars of the 16th century. The Cathedral of Our Lady, whose tower is the view from the roof terrace, was completed in 1521, so the houses and the spire belong to roughly the same Antwerp.

There are 20 rooms and one suite in five categories: Mood, Dreamer, Experience, Experience Terrace and the Experience Suite, from 18 to 48 square metres. The Dreamer and Experience rooms sit under the original beamed eaves; the Experience Terrace rooms have private outdoor space over the rooftops of the old town. Fodor’s, which lists Hotel Julien as a Fodor’s Choice, notes the limits of a building this old in a street this central: the street outside can be noisy and there is no private car park.

A first hotel for two designers

For the renovation Van Hool chose two people who had never done a hotel. Peter Ivens is an interior architect whose work is collected in a monograph called Houses; Bea Mombaers is a stylist and designer who runs the shop and gallery Items in Knokke. The pair have worked together on interiors for more than fifteen years. Van Hool, according to the press release that announced the reopening, wanted to work only with a designer whose style matched her own, and wanted a stay to feel like “visiting close friends”.

The designers kept the original layout and the way guests move through the two houses, and changed almost everything else. Reception, lounge, bar and breakfast room have new furniture made to measure, in aged oak and patinated metal, and the materials elsewhere are wool, stone, timber, linen and marble. Low painted wood panelling runs along the lounge walls, and steel-framed doors open from the lounge onto the courtyard. The lighting was designed with PS Lab to pick out the architecture rather than the furniture. “We wanted to strike a balance between a sense of coming home and a space that continues to inspire,” Ivens and Mombaers told Wallpaper* in May 2026.

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Giving the job to two designers of private houses was the right decision, because a 21-room hotel in a pair of 16th-century town houses is a private house with a reception desk, and the renovation reads like one. The details follow the same line: books on Belgian design and architecture in the rooms, Serax ceramics, some of them designed by the architect Vincent Van Duysen, Aesop products in the bathrooms and artwork sourced with Gallery 51.

Cellar, roof and breakfast

The spa is in the old cellar, with its vaults intact. It has a sauna, a steam room or hammam, a rain and waterfall shower and a heated stone table, and it is booked privately: one guest or one group at a time, by reservation, with massages on request and treatments using Maiwe products. Visitors who are not staying at the hotel can book it too.

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At the other end of the building is the roof terrace, with the cathedral tower in front of it and, in the description on the booking site Stay Somedays, a 360-degree view across the city. In between are the bar, with restored wood interiors and beers from De Koninck, the Antwerp brewery behind the bolleke, and a meeting room that can be hired separately. The whole hotel can be taken over for private events.

Breakfast changed with the renovation. It is now served à la carte rather than as a buffet, in a bright room on the ground floor, and outside guests can book it as well. The pastries come from Dôme, the brasserie under the rotunda in Zurenborg; the rest is made in the hotel’s kitchen from fresh ingredients. Check-in is from 15:00 and check-out at noon.

What it costs

Great Small Hotels, which sells rooms at Hotel Julien, has listed them from €197 a night in low season; terrace rooms and the suite cost more. The Michelin Guide includes the hotel among its selected stays and is candid about what it is: not a five-star resort, but a quiet base near the Grote Markt and the cathedral. That is a fair summary of what Van Hool set out to build in 2004, and the hotel’s own website, with its rooms, spa and breakfast, sells it on exactly those terms.

The photographs of the renovated hotel, published by Leibal and Wallpaper*, are by Yves Drieghe. The vaults in the cellar are 16th-century. The sauna is not.