People shovelling unsolicited mail through your letterbox are usually characterised by their total lack of interest in what they’re doing, but when Thomas Vandormael strode into our street recently, popping bits of paper into every front door, I sensed a different kind of messenger.
I happened to be walking along the pavement and watched as this large figure leafleted the neighbourhood, pausing and gazing intently up at every façade as he left his calling card.
This was clearly a man on a mission and when he reached me, he offered me one of his leaflets and asked, with a smile and a hint of urgency about him: “Do you live in this street? Does your house have any stained glass windows? If so, can you please send me pictures of them?”
I told him about the small round stained glass window above the front door and an unremarkable, in my opinion, larger section of faded and fragile stained glass window above the back door which was nearly thrown away years ago before a last-minute decision to preserve it by making the stained glass the filling in a double-glazing sandwich. “Have we ruined it?” I asked, apologetically.
“No, no,” he said, “I’m glad you kept it. I’d be grateful if you could send me photos…”
Instead, I ushered him inside to take his pictures, while I scanned the leaflet, which carried the logos of Brussels and Gent universities and explained that Thomas Vandormael is compiling a photographic inventory as part of his research into stained glass in Schaerbeek. It urges citizens to e-mail him pictures of their stained glass or give him a phone call.
“Stained glass windows are my passion” he explained, quite unnecessarily, as he left to continue his progress down the street.
And there, ladies and gentlemen, my story might have ended, and so many questions would have gone unanswered. For instance: why choose Schaerbeek, and isn’t there already a stained glass archive in Belgium, and if not, isn’t there a Department for the Monitoring and Preservation of Stained Glass in Buildings somewhere in the town hall?
So a few minutes after closing the door I dashed outside again and caught up with him further along the street.
Thomas was more than happy to expand on the subject, explaining that, while there is a comprehensive inventory of stained glass in public buildings, there’s no register of the situation in private dwellings.
As Thomas lives in Schaerbeek, the commune was a good place to gather evidence for the PhD he is currently doing on the subject: “Obviously, public buildings and churches are documented but there’s nothing about private houses. We have Art Nouveau, the Horta period, but nothing special from the great days of stained glass.”
Windows 1895
I must have been a good listener because a few days later he invited me round for a longer chat about what amounts to bits of coloured glass held together strips of lead, and the full extent of his passion was revealed.
Thomas, his wife and young daughter live in a bijou gem, of a house, a narrow 180-square metre, five-storey Belle Époque building with beautiful period woodwork and of course lots of stained glass windows. In fact, every window is original stained glass, which makes being in the house feel like living inside a very cosy kaleidoscope.
Thomas says the rooms are a bit small and it’s cold in winter but it was love at first sight and you can tell he wouldn’t change it for anything.
The house was of course the spur to his research project which is focused on a sample of just over 1,200 Schaerbeekian Belle Époque houses – those built between 1880 and 1914 – for which the commune holds archive details including construction dates and architects’ names.
At the time of writing, he had pushed 632 leaflets through 632 letterboxes and has had 82 positive replies, which, Thomas tells me, is 12.97 per cent of the 1,212 houses on his list.
So there’s a long way to go and meanwhile, there is his day job – working for a regional agency for car parking management, adjusting and developing Schaerbeek’s parking policy and monitoring the validity of parking tickets. That’s a whole other fascinating subject but we stick to stained glass as Thomas explains how he “fell in love” with the house, buying it in 2018.
Like the one next door, it’s part of the Brussels Capital Region Architectural Heritage Inventory and comes with restrictions. The house had already been restored, keeping all its original features. However, Thomas ran into complications when he upgraded the heating to compensate for the fact that the magnificent but thin stained glass windows are prone to draughts and winters are a bit tough. Double-glazing is of course out of the question.
But there are compensations. Thomas gets a tax break if he opens his house to the public during the annual Brussels Heritage Days, usually the third weekend in September every year, when the public can pop round and look at his stained glass and other Belle Époque features from the inside. This year he hosted 400 visitors, but not, I imagine, all at the same time.
Looking out of the house, there’s virtually no other stained glass to be seen anywhere in a street like many others where post-war modernisation, comfort and convenience trumped architectural legacy.
So Thomas is on a crusade to prevent people like me from throwing out their remaining stained glass unless strictly necessary when we are doing home improvements. Or at least, if it must be thrown out, he hopes homeowners will help him record its existence for all time on camera first as a contribution towards his planned 300-page final report.
He struggled when he began his studies three years ago, as there’s no formal scholarly subject covering the role of stained glass windows in houses. “As an art historian, I couldn’t find anything at all relating to 19th and early 20th-century stained glass in houses in Belgium. And my professors are not experts in stained glass, they’re more specialists in sculpture, silver, and jewellery, so it’s a learning curve for my tutors too. It’s really research based on primary sources.”
His bespoke studying course, when not working on the commune’s car parking logistics, will end in 2026. But his field work – pushing leaflets through letter boxes – with end in spring 2024.
Which leaves a few months left for those of you on his stained glass hit list, to help Thomas compile a comprehensive photo library of a fine period in the thousand-year history of an amazing craft.
His details are below, but before I finish, just a brief word about another stranger who crossed the Meade threshold recently and, if not changed the world, also added to the sum of human knowledge.
A modest proposal
He was a dishwasher repair man who was very chatty and jolly as he sat hunched over the mechanics of a machine which was leaky and ominously noisy and clearly needed bits replacing. It took him two goes to identify the problem and during his second visit he seemed a bit more subdued than previously.
At one point he started asking about the house – not about the double-glazed, faded stained glass window above the kitchen door, which more recently so entranced Thomas, but about how long we’d been here and, crucially, from dishwasher man’s point of view, whether this house had ever been a restaurant.
I replied that indeed it had, as confirmed by the fact that for a long time after moving in we received a monthly catering trade magazine addressed to ‘Restaurant Il Campino’.
Further evidence had come from a very elderly neighbour early in our occupancy who made it perfectly clear on more than one occasion that his Friday night evening stroll along the road for a bowl of pasta in our house had been the highlight of his week.
In fact, it hadn’t been a restaurant for at least a decade before we moved in, even though the monthly catering mag still arrived, but the neighbour managed to make us feel guilty.
All this confirmatory information sent dishwasher man into a sort of trance as he looked around the room we were standing in and finally pointed to a particular spot and said wistfully: “Yes, yes, this is it, definitely, this is where I proposed to my wife.”
I heard myself congratulating him on proposing to someone I didn’t know in a restaurant I never knew but of which I now felt myself to be the custodian long after it needed one.
Then I told dishwasher man he simply had to bring his wife round for dinner to relive the memory. We’d set up a table in the exact spot where they once gazed into each other’s eyes, and, if he could remember exactly what they ordered, we’d make the same meal for him, for old times’ sake.
He slowly shook his head and said they had divorced long ago and the thought of being here with her way back then was too much to bear. He quietly finished his repair job, gave me the bill and left. If the dishwasher ever breaks down again, I’m going to have to find another dishwasher man.
