Antwerp

Baroque soul and design grit meet in Antwerp – a Belgian city shaped by portside modernism, fashion revolutions and quiet grandeur. This is a culture with an edge, where every corner tells a story.

Antwerp slips under the radar and dresses it well – Flemish flair, portside grit and couture cool stitched into a city that quietly commands the stage. Belgium’s second city is no second act – it’s a story of baroque bravado and fashion-world edge, where Rubens’ golden grandeur meets concept-store minimalism.

The city opens like a curated lookbook: 17th-century gables cast long shadows over plate-glass galleries, while Art Nouveau mansions sit shoulder to shoulder with brutalist gems and pared-back ateliers. Rubens' legacy runs deep here – his former home and studio is now a museum filled with swirling ceilings, masterworks and drama, echoing the baroque heartbeat that still pulses beneath the city’s polished surface. This is also the spiritual home of the Antwerp Six – that avant-garde gang of designers who spun fashion on its head and planted the city firmly on the global style map.

Creative energy hums through the streets, from the dockside district of Het Eilandje – where converted warehouses now house Michelin restaurants and moody museums, to the leafy lanes of Zurenborg, famed for its Belle Époque swagger and secret cafés. South in the Zuid quarter, neoclassical façades front bold cultural spaces – the FOMU photography museum, the modernist MUHKA and tucked-away galleries that deal in both concept and craft.

In the heart of Zuid, KMSKA – the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp – brings another layer of narrative. After an ambitious restoration, the neoclassical museum now hides a starkly modern core within its grand shell. A luminous white cube gallery floats inside the old walls, housing works by Van Eyck, Rubens and Ensor, alongside a bold rehang that mixes the classical with the surreal. It’s a quiet architectural coup – a statement on how to honour history while disrupting expectation.

Architecture fans will beeline to the city’s northern docks, where The Port House (Havenhuis) cuts a futuristic silhouette. Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, this striking feat of engineering perches a glass-clad structure – angular, prismatic, glinting like a fractured diamond – above a restored 20th-century fire station. It’s a beacon of innovation, home to the Antwerp Port Authority, with interiors that blend restored courtyards, light-filled workspaces and bold geometry. More than a visual spectacle, the building’s sustainability credentials stack up too – a BREEAM-rated icon in a city that’s always looking forward.

Antwerp’s aesthetic is never showy – it simmers. You’ll find elegance in soft lighting, moody interiors, a love of materials: poured concrete, polished wood, smoked glass. Independent fashion labels thrive alongside antique bookshops, roastery cafés and bakeries that smell like home. Even the train station is a theatrical gesture – all domed glass and marble pomp.

Yet for all its design cred, Antwerp stays grounded – a working port city with a layered past. Think Gothic cathedrals, diamond traders, Jewish quarter delis and a devotion to good bread and better beer.

Just outside the city, one name casts a long shadow – Axel Vervoordt. In 2017, the celebrated Belgian art and design maestro unveiled Kanaal, a 55,000-square-metre cultural hub built within a former malt distillery. Eighteen years in the making, this red-brick reverie fuses architecture, nature and artistic vision – a countryside compound of sculptural calm less than half an hour from Antwerp. There’s a Poilâne bakery, an organic market, exhibition spaces curated with pieces by James Turrell, Anish Kapoor and El Anatsui, and meditative interiors shaded in dark hues – a counterpoint to the white-cube world. Part gallery, part sanctuary, Kanaal channels Vervoordt’s singular philosophy of space, beauty and soul.