Logis & Floréal: two surprising garden cities

In In Le Logis and Floréal, you experience a living environment that has captured the imagination for over a century: winding lanes, lush front gardens, and rich vegetation with hundreds of Japanese cherry trees that form a soft pink blossom mist around the houses every spring. These garden suburbs in Watermael-Boitsfort were created at the request of two tenant cooperatives starting in 1921–1922 and were designed by architect Jean-Jules Eggericx in collaboration with urban planner Louis Van der Swaelmen, within the garden city idea that came to Belgium from England at the beginning of the 20th century. Unlike the more rigid city grid, everything here seems to have grown organically: rolling terrain, variation in geometry and sightlines, and a fluid symbiosis of buildings and nature. Zinnia Square and Bosuilstraat Al walking through this neighborhood, you immediately notice that Le Logis and Floréal form two separate cooperatives, each with its own character but part of one large whole. In Floréal the relief varies greatly, which leads to a picturesque alternation in view and perspective, while Le Logis shows more structure and hierarchy in the street layout. Details such as different colors of joinery—green for Le Logis and yellow for Floréal—subtly make the distinction between the neighborhoods visible. In addition, the street names also point to the difference: residents of one neighborhood live in streets that refer to birds, while in the other neighborhood references are made to flowers. Today, Le Logis and Floréal are protected heritage and form one of the largest and best-preserved garden suburbs in Europe, with approximately 1,500 homes on a site of about 80 hectares. The architecture reflects a classic single-family home with pitched roofs and richly filled facades, in which Eggericx strove for variation within a homogeneous whole. At the same time, there is a lively community life: since 2001, the cooperatives have still been operating according to cooperative values, with resident participation in the management and maintenance of their environment. During a guided walk, you will discover how the combination of urban planning vision, architectural care, and green design makes Le Logis-Floréal a timeless model for human housing design in the city.