Rug buying in Meise

The building stock

The Flemish inventory describes Meise as a municipality "fairly heavily urbanised, where the residential function comes first", but whose expansion dates mainly from the end of the 1950s. Around the Sint-Martinuskerk / presbytery core: a heterogeneous nineteenth- and twentieth-century fabric, historic farms such as the Drijtorenhof and the Haeck, and a series of villas — cottage-style and modernist — several of them by Luc Viérin and Willy Van Der Meeren.

It is in that building stock that the rugs we buy lie sleeping: interwar attics, reception rooms, landing cupboards.

Who lives here

2022 incomes: a median income of €34,639 per tax return and an average income of €48,429, across 11,447 returns — the highest level of the three Flemish towns covered here (Wemmel: €30,104 median; Zaventem: €30,823).

That profile rings us to sell more often than elsewhere: people move away, they inherit, they change their lives, and the rug does not follow.

The rug market

The domaine de Bouchout, in Meise, is home to the Jardin botanique de Meise, one of the largest in the world: around 18,000 plant species — roughly 6% of the known species — and a herbarium of about 4 million specimens. The garden moved there in 1958, the decision to transfer it going back to 1937. The château de Bouchout was the residence of Empress Charlotte of Mexico until her death in 1927.

That is the circuit through which a rug changes hands here. We are the direct alternative to it: no waiting, no commission, payment the same day.