The vast 18th-century palace of a Ghent textile baron was abandoned for many years. But the downstairs rooms of the Huis Arnold Vander Haeghen on Veldstraat are now open to the public for a few hours every week.
You can admire the grand staircase, elegant dining room and rare Chinese wallpaper. The house also includes the reconstructed study of Maurice Maeterlinck, the Ghent writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911.
Derek Blyth’s hidden secret of the day: Derek Blyth is the author of the bestselling “The 500 Hidden Secrets of Belgium”. He picks out one of his favourite hidden secrets for The Brussels Times every day.
