3-Bed Family House on Eksel's Market Square – 272m² Second Home in Belgian Kempen



Marktplein 17, 3941 Eksel, Belgium, Hechtel-Eksel (Belgium)
3 Bedrooms · 1 Bathrooms · 272m² Floor area
€595,000
House
No parking
3 Bedrooms
1 Bathrooms
272m²
Garden
No pool
Not furnished
Description
Saturday morning in Eksel starts with the smell of fresh bread drifting from the bakery two doors down on Marktplein. You open the living room's large windows, let the village sounds in — a cyclist ringing a bell, the low hum of conversation at the café terrace — and pour a coffee before anyone else in the house is awake. That quiet, unhurried rhythm is what makes this address so hard to walk away from.
Marktplein 17 sits directly on Eksel's central square, which sounds like it should be noisy, but isn't. This is a Flemish village of about 4,000 people in the Limburg province, part of the broader Kempen heathland region — flat, forested, and fiercely underrated as a base for anyone seeking real Belgian countryside life rather than a postcard version of it. The house itself is a solidly built detached property, originally constructed in 1954 and put through a thorough renovation in 2010 that brought everything up to a genuinely modern standard. At 272 square meters of interior space on a 1,033-square-meter plot, it's one of the larger private homes on the square, and it shows.
Inside, the scale hits you immediately. The entrance hallway is wide and welcoming — not the narrow corridor you often find in Belgian village homes of this era. It opens into a living room where a built-in gas fireplace anchors the space. On rainy November afternoons, and there will be rainy November afternoons in Limburg, that fireplace earns its place. The room gets light from generous windows that look out toward the square; you catch the weekly market stalls being set up on Friday evenings, the brass band rehearsing in the community hall across the way in spring. There's a particular pleasure in being at the center of a village's small, reliable rituals.
The kitchen is fully equipped and practical in the way Belgian kitchens tend to be — thoughtful rather than showy. A breakfast nook runs along one wall, and a utility room sits adjacent, which anyone who has spent a wet weekend cycling the Kempen trails will immediately appreciate. Mud room functionality without sacrificing the overall feel of the space.
Three bedrooms occupy the upper floor, each properly proportioned. The master includes a walk-in dressing area, which makes a difference when a house is used by multiple family members in rotation — as many second homes in this region are. The other two rooms work equally well as guest rooms, a children's bedroom, or a quiet study. Speaking of which: there's also a dedicated office space on the ground floor. For buyers who work remotely even part of the year, this is genuinely separate from the living areas, with enough acoustic distance to take a call without the household knowing every word.
The bathroom is clean and modern — walk-in shower, freestanding bathtub, double washbasin. Three additional separate toilets with hand basins are distributed through the house, a detail that sounds minor until you have a full household and a houseguest who needs the bathroom at the same moment. The solar panels on the roof come with green energy certificates and meaningfully reduce running costs. The EPC rating is D, and additional interior wall insulation (installed outside the EPC calculation) improves thermal performance further. The detached garage has an automatic sectional door and an EV charging point — a genuine asset as electric vehicles become the default across Belgium and the Netherlands. Parking on Marktplein itself is ample, and the garage plus carport give you covered space for two vehicles easily.
Out back, the garden runs to just over 1,000 square meters. It's private, largely hidden from the square, and big enough to divide into zones — a terrace for eating outside through Belgium's surprisingly warm June-to-August summers, a lawn for children, a vegetable patch if that's your inclination. The cellar and attic add flexibility for storage, a wine collection, a hobby room, or — with planning permission — future conversion.
Now, the location. Hechtel-Eksel sits in the northeast corner of the Belgian province of Limburg, roughly equidistant between Hasselt (about 35 kilometers southwest) and Eindhoven just across the Dutch border (around 40 kilometers north). The E314 motorway connects you to Leuven and Brussels in under 90 minutes; Eindhoven Airport, which serves a wide range of European budget and full-service routes, is under an hour's drive. For buyers coming from the UK, Germany, or the Netherlands, this is a notably easy property to reach for long weekends.
The Kempen region around Eksel is almost entirely given over to outdoor life. The Bosland forest — over 5,000 hectares of pine and heathland — begins practically at the edge of the village and contains hundreds of kilometers of marked cycling and walking routes. The treetop walk at Pijnven, about 10 minutes by bike, is one of Belgium's most visited nature attractions, a 100-meter elevated walkway through the forest canopy that children absolutely love and adults find unexpectedly moving. In late August, when the heathland turns purple with flowering Calluna, the whole landscape shifts color in a way that's specific to this part of Europe and easy to become attached to.
Local food is hearty and rooted in tradition. Zoervleis — a sweet-sour braised meat dish, a Limburg specialty — appears on most menus in the village café and at the restaurants in nearby Hechtel and Peer. The Bokbier festival in Peer each October draws a serious crowd of Belgian and Dutch beer enthusiasts. Hasselt, the provincial capital, has a strong restaurant scene and hosts the Jeneverfeesten gin festival in August — a three-day event that has been running for decades and fills the city's handsome market square with distillers, food stalls, and live music.
For families, the practical checklist is solid. Several primary schools are within walking or short cycling distance. The secondary school network in Hechtel is accessible by regular bus service. Supermarkets, a pharmacy, a GP, and a range of local shops are all in easy reach. This is a village where daily life functions without a car for most errands, which matters more than it might seem when you're spending extended periods here.
As a vacation home or second residence, the property functions extremely well. The size allows multiple families or extended groups to stay comfortably. The office space means owners who work remotely can treat this as a primary base for weeks or months at a time — the kind of flexible arrangement that's become common among buyers from the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK who want a Belgian base without the prices of Bruges or Ghent. The Kempen property market has seen steady appreciation over the past decade, driven partly by demand from Dutch buyers (property prices on the Belgian side of the border remain considerably lower than equivalent properties in Noord-Brabant), and a well-maintained house on Marktplein in a village with this level of amenity is not the kind of opportunity that sits on the market for long.
For international buyers, Belgium's legal framework for property purchase is well-established and foreigner-friendly. There are no restrictions on non-Belgian EU or non-EU citizens purchasing residential property. Notarial fees and registration duties apply, typically around 12-14% on top of the purchase price, and a local notary will guide you through the process. Rental income is taxable in Belgium, and the property's size and location make short-term holiday rental a realistic option for periods when you're not in residence — the cycling and nature tourism market in the Kempen is active year-round.
Key features at a glance:
- Detached house, fully renovated in 2010, on Eksel's central Marktplein
- 272 m² of interior living space across two main floors, cellar, and attic
- 1,033 m² private plot with large rear garden
- Three bedrooms; master with walk-in dressing area
- Modern bathroom with walk-in shower, bathtub, and double washbasin
- Three separate toilets with hand basins
- Dedicated ground-floor office space
- Built-in gas fireplace in the main living room
- Fully equipped kitchen with breakfast nook and utility room
- Detached garage with automatic door, carport, and certified EV charging point
- Solar panels with green energy certificates
- Additional interior wall insulation beyond EPC D rating
- Direct access to Bosland forest cycling and walking network
- Under one hour from Eindhoven Airport; 90 minutes from Brussels
- Strong short-term rental market driven by Kempen nature tourism
If you'd like to arrange a private viewing of Marktplein 17 or want to discuss the buying process in Belgium as an international purchaser, get in touch with the Homestra team. Properties of this size and condition in central Eksel are genuinely rare — it's worth seeing this one in person before forming an opinion either way.
Details
- Amount of bedrooms
- 3
- Size
- 272m²
- Price per m²
- €2,188
- Garden size
- 1033m²
- Has Garden
- Yes
- Has Parking
- No
- Has Basement
- No
- Condition
- good
- Amount of Bathrooms
- 1
- Has swimming pool
- No
- Property type
- House
- Energy label
Unknown
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