My space: Edouard Vermeulen
European royalty’s favourite fashion designer welcomes Helen Chislett into his Brussels home
Edouard Vermeulen may not be instantly recognisable in some parts of the world, but in Belgium he is a very grand fromage indeed. Having embarked on a career in interior design aged 23, he took a sublet on Avenue Louise in Brussels — in what happened to be the same stately rooms where Paul Natan, a legendary Belgium couturier of the 1930s to the 1950s, had run his own maison.
When asked to help raise funds for a charity, he had the impish idea of producing a catwalk collection of his own designs in homage to the previous occupant. It was then that fate stepped in. In the audience, as patron of the charity, was Princess Paola, wife of the future King Albert II; she went on to become one of Vermeulen’s most illustrious patrons.
Over the next three decades, he became designer of choice not only to the current Queen of Belgium, Mathilde, and to Princesses Léa and Claire, but also to the royal families of the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Vermeulen kept the name, Natan, because it had such good associations. As to his change of course, he says it was simply a matter of being ‘young — and totally fearless as the young are’.
He says that women’s attitudes to how they dress have changed enormously. ‘We used to produce collections with three customers in mind: daughter, mother, grandmother. Today, a woman of 50 will dress like a woman 10 or 15 years younger, and why not? Natan is not about slavishly following fashions, but making women feel good about themselves.’
Vermeulen lives a short walk from his studio in an Art Deco apartment facing the Abbaye de la Cambre, close to the Ixelles lakes. He loves his home for ‘its convenience and also its charm’, describing it as being ‘like the very best sort of hotel suite: a series of rooms connected by double doors, with huge windows looking out to the gardens’.
Over the past 10 years, he has filled the light-flooded rooms with a masterful mix of the contemporary and the antique, the comfortable and the unexpected — proof, if any were needed, that fashion’s gain was interior design’s loss.
His business, meanwhile, has expanded to six premises in Belgium, multi-brand stores all over the world and a flagship in Amsterdam opening in September; and this year also sees the launch of Natan in the UK, with its elegant, ready-to-wear collections in jewel-like shades available at stores such as Celeste & Rose and Episode Fashions in London, and Ginger in Norwich. One suspects that Vermeulen may soon have a different royal family in his sights.
Edouard Vermeulen in his Brussels home. Photograph by Frederik Vercruysse