In the Belgian morning drizzle, Dries Van Noten is setting out to gather flowers and foliage for Ringenhof, his exquisite house set in a 55-acre park on the outskirts of the medieval town of Lier. Once his foraging is complete, he will arrange these trophies in his layered, atmospheric room sets with the same quirky sense of color harmonies, games of scale, and suave asymmetry that he brings to his fashion design. Just now, though, Van Noten is brandishing secateurs and a trug of woven wicker as large as a child’s canoe; his Airedale terrier, Harry, is bounding alongside him, and he has added the flourish of a dandified polka-dot navy silk scarf to his classically English ensemble of a Barbouresque coat of his own design and Wellington boots.
Van Noten’s process is painstaking, for he is scrupulous about not cutting branches, blooms, or even grasses visible to the wanderer along the pathways that snake through his estate’s dazzling landscapes. As a result, there is some complicated sleuthing afoot as he roots around the hidden undergrowth for specimens that will not be missed or climbs ladders to retrieve branches from well above the sight line. There is method in the designer’s madness, however, for at every turn the vistas, walks, and gardens have been carefully orchestrated to amaze and delight the eye, every plant and tree unself-consciously in its place.
The stately trees first planted here a century or more ago now rise from a lush massing of shrubs, including clouds of rhododendrons and the yellow-blooming wild azaleas so characteristic of grand Belgian parks. Under the shade of an allée of ancient beech trees, meanwhile, spots of bright-pink wild cyclamen blister the mossy ground like the paint dabs on a pointillist's canvas. But there have been even more dramatic interventions since Van Noten and his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe, were first guided to this magical kingdom nearly 20 years ago by Jelena de Belder, a legendary plantswoman whom Van Noten fondly describes as “my gardening mother.” De Belder was famed for her own magnificent gardens at Hemelrijk (“Kingdom of Heaven” in Dutch), a 250-acre estate north of Antwerp where Van Noten's family had a neighboring country house. (At Hemelrijk, De Belder worked with the great landscape architect Russell Page and was famed for the many varieties of hydrangea and witch hazel she developed—a great number of which now also thrive at Ringenhof.)
At the time, Van Noten and Vangheluwe were living in an apartment in the center of Antwerp, mere moments from company headquarters—a proximity that resulted in their lives being taken over by the ceaseless demands of the growing label the two founded in 1986. The Ringenhof project was thus appealing on several levels: It promised a certain distance—both physical (it’s a 30-minute drive from Van Noten’s office) and conceptual—from fashion, along with boundless possibilities for decorating and gardening.
“I think gardening keeps me in balance,” Van Noten says, “and I think that’s really important. If I had continued the way I was working, my relationship with Vangheluwe wouldn't have survived. You just start to talk about fashion this and fashion that, and problems with deliveries and fabrics—and at a certain moment we would have killed each other!”
Though Van Noten’s father was a distinguished gardener, his young son was anything but. “I hated it,” he says. “We were forced to work every weekend in the garden, but as a child you want to do other things than weeding and sawing wood.” Years later, though, when Van Noten and Vangheluwe started to visit storied English houses and their inspirational gardens, “I fell in love with the whole idea,” he says, and the two started cultivating flowers in their tiny Antwerp garden, where eventually “the terrace nearly collapsed under the weight of the pots and the plants.
“The next step was from a small city garden to this,” says Van Noten, surveying the rolling landscape beyond the swan-scudded lake. “Which was a little bit like, ‘Oops!’”
When they discovered Ringenhof, it was in a dauntingly forlorn and parlous state. The exquisite neoclassical house (built in the 1840s as a summer retreat for a bourgeois beer dynasty on the site of a 1699 maison de plaisance) still bore traces of its youthful beauty and singular allure, though, and the crumbling pavilions and follies that dotted its gardens managed yet to evoke the elegant languor of its nineteenth-century heyday. However, you could look up through rotten floors and the roof to the skies above, and the subterranean kitchens and service rooms were mottled after decades of flooding from nearby canal systems. The desolate park that engirdled it opened directly onto views of the neighbors’ tidy suburban houses with their own kempt gardens on one side, and on another to the main road and its string of service stations and car dealerships.
Now Ringenhof seems a magical demesne of its own, isolated from other signs of humanity—a great luxury in this small, crowded country. (“We are spoiled,” says Van Noten.) A graded hill breaks the former desolate view to the waterways, and wild coots and geese frolic on a brace of little ponds while artfully arranged arboretums and a hydrangea walk hide the road. The once-damp basement is now a splendid Edwardian kitchen complete with a battalion of antique copper molds in which Van Noten experiments with Negroni, Vino Santo, or rose-petal jellies. The follies scattered around the grounds have been sensitively restored, including a summer teahouse with amethyst glass windows, a temple formed of rustic tree trunks, and a guinguette—a metal-frame structure like a circus's big tent, enclosed by a tall, circular beech hedge and supported by pollarded linden trees whose spreading greenery provides a shady roof. When the lindens blossom in July, the scent is intoxicating.
The view of the neighboring village houses, meanwhile, was obfuscated by the landscape architect Erik Dhont, who conceived a series of grandiose yew hedges punctuated with cypress trees in the Italian manner flanking a remarkable double-yew hedge laid out in an asymmetric zigzag formation, its borders now planted with day lilies, ferns, and hostas. Inspired by the gardens at Renishaw Hall, Van Noten recently planted fuchsia inside the yew, which now spurts drops of crimson from deep within the hedges’ green walls—which in turn lead to an enclosed garden of old-fashioned rosebushes and the picturesque nineteenth-century Swiss Cottage guesthouse of half-timbered brick and pebbledash. This house’s interiors have been evocatively arranged with the help of Van Noten’s friend Gert Voorjans, the gifted interior designer who also works on the brand's store environments, which, with their soft furnishings, idiosyncratic antiques, and intriguing artworks, effectively conjure the convivial atmosphere of his houses.
Further gardens were to follow. In 2003, Piet Oudolf, whose subtly layered plantings of grasses and unusual shrubs give Manhattan’s High Line its shimmering magic, created a dark earth pathway that snakes through the property, with banks of thistles and echinacea Julia rising like steep heather moors on either side.
Van Noten ends his flower-gathering mission in the Rose Garden, which, in his country’s rain-sodden climate (and with the tender ministrations of the estate’s three full-time gardeners), has bloomed to opulent maturity in just three years. This new garden has been planned in classic English fashion with a large square acre divided into four quadrants, each providing a different atmosphere, and given further architectural form by eye-catching arrangements of handsome stone spires and Gothic elements salvaged from the fifteenth-century cathedral in Lier. Though one compartment here is planted with a precisely ordered battalion of apple and pear trees, the rest have the tumbling romance of the British gardens that Van Noten and Vangheluwe spend much of their rare free time exploring—enduring loves such as Sissinghurst, Great Dixter, and Hidcote, along with current passions including the stately Hardwick Hall, Rousham, and West Dean.
In its Impressionist shimmer of color and pattern, this garden evokes the muddled prints in Van Noten's acclaimed spring 2008 show, with its dramatic, never-ending file of Bloomsbury heroines. His fashion palette, in fact, is often suggestive of his garden's unanticipated tonal adventures, for Van Noten is a designer who eschews Pantone matches, deeming them too synthetic. Instead, he makes his meticulous choices from among thousands of cuttings from assorted textiles, carefully arranged by nuanced tone in the glass-fronted drawers of old-fashioned haberdashery cabinets.
More of Van Noten's process was revealed when Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris unveiled a retrospective (“Dries Van Noten, Inspirations”) that brought his unique world and aesthetic to vivid life. The exhibition was conceived with curator Pamela Golbin as a kind of twenty-first-century Wunderkammer that juxtaposed iconic pieces of Van Noten's own design with masterworks from the museum’s archive and significant loans of sculpture and painting from such storied institutions as the Musée d’Orsay, the Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Belgian Royal collections. It opened with fashions from the cusp of the eighties by the likes of Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, Giorgio Armani, and Gianni Versace, whose work influenced Van Noten and his student contemporaries at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (they would go on to be famously dubbed the Antwerp Six, and included Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, and Dirk Bikkembergs), who soon took their collections to a London trade fair. “Out of frustration,” Van Noten says, “because we couldn’t find partners to produce our clothes—they thought we were crazy.”
As unknowns, they were consigned to a far-flung corner behind the bridal section. Nevertheless, Barneys was Van Noten’s first customer, ordering his menswear in the smallest sizes for its women's department. As he didn't have skirts, the store also instructed him to “just make one short, and one long, and it will be fine,” as he remembers. He made 36 of each style, and his women’s line was born.
Fashion, after all, was in Van Noten's blood: His grandfather was a successful tailor who opened a gentleman’s outfitter in Antwerp; a generation later, his father owned designer boutiques in the city. His mother's collection of antique linens and lace, meanwhile, nurtured in her son a passion for the history and poetry of textiles, which is evident in his choices from Les Arts Décoratifs's own rich costume holdings. The artworks shown in dialogue with these pieces run the eclectic gamut of Driesian influences, from Bronzino's portrait of a young man in an ebony doublet (acquired by Louis XIV in 1671 and borrowed from the Louvre for the first time) to Giovanni Boldini’s dashing 1897 portrait of the aristocratic dandy Count Robert de Montesquiou, along with contemporary favorites such as Elizabeth Peyton, Christopher Wool, and Damien Hirst. There are clips from influential movies—including Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (both 1971), and Fred Zinnemann’s 1977 Julia—and Van Noten has curated the costume exhibitions in artful and occasionally wry harmony: Marcel Broodthaers’s 1968 Pot of Mussels, for instance, is shown with a Jacques Fath embroidery sample made with mussel shells by the great Rébé and jewelry of shells and flotsam caught in a fishermen’s net made by Vicki Sarge for a ’90s Van Noten show.
The designer’s fascination with dandy dressing is reflected in nineteenth-century hussar uniforms and the personal accouterments of such iconic male style leaders as the Baron de Redé, David Hockney, the Duke of Windsor, Jimi Hendrix, and Paul Poiret (whose work jacket, printed with an artichoke-leaf design by Raoul Dufy, might have stepped off a Van Noten runway).
There are paintings, too, from Van Noten and Vangheluwe’s collection of early-twentieth-century portraits by Belgian artists—pictures that now crowd the walls of Ringenhof's evocative, Proustian interiors. At what he calls his “first big auction experience,” Van Noten acquired Georges Van Zevenberghen’s Three Drunken Ladies, which hangs in an upstairs sitting room crowded with chinoiserie and Japanese furnishings, and that early success fostered a consuming passion: Auction catalogs now cover every surface of the room, and the house is filled with intriguing pieces—more often than not with distinguished provenance—from Yves Saint Laurent to the dukes of Devonshire. Ringenhof’s basement, meanwhile, is filled with still-crated furniture and chandeliers, and the charming attic bedrooms with a large stock of carpets waiting to find rooms along with the Raj-era portraits that Van Noten and Vangheluwe collected on their frequent inspiration trips to India.
Van Noten is justifiably proud of the magnificent antique yellow damask curtains in the master bedroom, newly acquired from a Swiss château. In the dining room, the table is spread with a bizarre silk brocade he had woven by Mantero for his fall 2006 Turkish collection, and a soft pink silk-and-cotton fabric also developed for one of his collections hangs in front of the house's tall windows, warming Belgium’s cool gray light.
During the First World War, the house was shattered by shelling. Later owners commissioned the celebrated Belgian decorator-architects Franck to not only repair the house's framework but also create a series of ersatz period rooms. The entrance hall in honeyed oak boiserie is a study in Louis XV rococo exuberance, while the English drawing room, with its faux-Grinling Gibbons wood carvings, opens onto an enfilade of a smaller sitting room appointed in high-French Empire style and a dining room with a trompe l'oeil of birds fluttering around a cerulean sky. Van Noten had everything restored scrupulously, retaining the time-worn patinas of the interior wood- and plasterwork, along with the faded textiles with which some of the rooms had been hung.
“Other people may have a house at the seaside, or a chalet, or they go to the South of France,” the designer says. “We have this. It’s our winter and our summer.” When he contemplates holidays now, he weighs them against the possibilities of missing his garden’s unique moments. “It’s a garden,” he adds, “and if you miss a certain week, you won’t see the magnolias!”
As a designer, the maverick Van Noten always wanted to work independently of the traditional fashion capitals. Antwerp, familiar and human-scaled, was a logical choice. “Living in a big city would be difficult now,” he says, breathing in the comforting smell of his gardens. “The fact that you can go home to something like this and have a walk—that’s quite relaxing; you can focus and see which things are really important and which are not important. It’s very strange, fashion: four times a year, being judged. It’s not always so easy to balance.”
He takes another breath. “Even in winter, when it is dark,” he says, “having a small walk in the garden is magical.”