Saturday morning. The kitchen window is cracked open, and the only sounds are wood pigeons somewhere deep in the beech hedge and the faint creak of the veranda door catching the breeze. No traffic. No neighbors peering over the fence. Just 4,335 square meters of park garden stretching back toward open meadows, and the particular quiet that only comes when you're far enough from everything to actually exhale.
That's Olmsebaan 204. And once you've stood in that garden, it's hard to imagine being anywhere else.
This four-bedroom villa in Meerhout, in the green heart of the Campine region of Antwerp Province, sits on one of those rare plots where the garden doesn't end — it just becomes the countryside. A side gate opens directly onto the meadows behind, and there's no fence, no wall, no development blocking the view to the horizon. The mature tree embankment at the rear gives you total privacy from behind, while the south-facing orientation means the garden holds the sun from mid-morning until the last light of the evening. In June, that's a very long time.
The villa itself was built in 1979, and you can feel the confidence of that era in the structure — solid, wide, set well back from the road behind a private driveway with an automatic gate. But the interiors have been carefully modernized over the years, and what you get now is something better than either original or contemporary alone. The oak woodwork that runs through the ground floor has been whitewashed to a pale, almost Scandinavian finish. Large windows — and there are a lot of them — pull the garden inside in a way that makes the 279 square meters of living space feel even more generous than it already is.
Come in through the entrance hall, with its gallery ... click here to read more
