Near Ghent in East Flanders, CAS Architecten builds Villa WIGO through an unusual collaboration — two couples, two sets of architects, two generations — producing two volumes in an L that fuse a concrete living pavilion with a dark timber barn.
The name WIGO is a contraction of the project's owners, and the collaborative structure is embedded in the building's logic: one side was designed by Anton Gonnissen and his wife Inge (the owner-architects), the other by Pieter-Jan and Jovanca from CAS Architecten. Two generations working on the same project, two formal languages in negotiation, and an L-plan arrangement that makes the resolution visible — each volume reading as itself while the ensemble reads as one.
Seen from the road, the first volume positions itself perpendicular to the street as a reinterpretation of the classic barn typology: simple in form, dark in material — charred or black-stained timber cladding at the upper register — and assigned all non-residential functions and building services. The decision to concentrate the technical and service content of the house in this barn volume is a liberating one: it frees the second volume, the living pavilion, from any dead surface area, allowing every room to connect directly with the outdoor spaces and the views beyond the L-shaped front courtyard.
The living pavilion is constructed in concrete — a material whose mass and continuity contrast with the dark timber of the barn but whose palette remains in the same family of restrained, mineral tones. The interaction between enclosed and glazed spaces in the living areas is the spatial event of the interior: glass corners, large openings, the play between containment and transparency that Belgian residential architecture has developed with particular consistency over the past decade. The gravel courtyard enclosed by the L provides a semi-private outdoor room that the two volumes share.
Tim Van de Velde's photographs make the most of the Belgian light — overcast but directional, the kind that gives concrete its most compelling quality: dense and shadowless at once, surfaces registering time rather than spectacle. Villa WIGO is a project about what happens when the brief is genuinely shared — when the client and the architect are not in opposition but in a collaboration complex enough that the result carries the marks of more than one intelligence.
