4 Best Sights in Ixelles and Saint-Gilles, Brussels

The house where Victor Horta (1861–1947), one of the major forces in Art Nouveau design, lived and worked until 1919 is the best place to see how he thought. Inspired by the direction of the turn-of-the-20th-century British Arts and Crafts movement, he amplified its designs into an entire architectural scheme, shaping iron and steel into fluid, organic curves. Horta had a hand in every aspect of his design, from the door hinges to the wall treatments. 

Nineteenth-century painter and sculptor Constantin Meunier (1831–1905) made his mark capturing the hardships of Belgian workers in a distinctive, realistic style. Examples of his work are displayed in his former house and studio.

This workshop-museum began life in 1850 when the painter, sculptor, and writer Antoine Wiertz (1806--65) agreed to leave his collection to the Belgian government before his death. All the more surprising given he was a somewhat controversial figure, drawn to create huge canvases of often shocking subjects, from a naked woman staring down a skeleton, to gruesome accounts of Greek history, and the truly macabre Premature Burial, where a hand is seen clawing its way out of a coffin.

Built in 1381, this gate is a unique remnant of Brussels’s city walls, which tend to reappear in unusual places. (For example, if you continue down nearby rue Haute, you'll spy a huge chunk of wall next to the bowling alley at the crossroads with boulevard de l'Empereur.) In 1847, this gate became one of the first museums in Europe, though it lost its collections to the Cinquantenaire complex in the 1870s. It now has a permanent exhibition on medieval Brussels, and if you climb its 169 steps to the roof, a crenelated walkway affords sweeping views of the neighborhood.