This season, Brussels tried on a new format. The former Brussels Design September seems to have gone through a careful wash and emerged as the more concise Brussels Design Week (24 September–4 October). But true elegance has nothing to do with the length of a hemline: the shorter format has simply brought the festival’s impeccable texture and high concentration of ideas into sharper focus.

For the first time, the festival has its own place of gravity, a headquarters: AME, a showroom and gallery where you can drop in to get acquainted with the programme, find all the information you need, meet festival participants and simply enjoy a cup of excellent specialty coffee.

AME was created by the extraordinary Alba Pregja, a marketing specialist with experience at Politico, who in 2020 founded WOMADE, a platform for women entrepreneurs. She has scaled what was originally a rather intimate concept into a 900-square-metre space. AME is a living ecosystem built on three pillars: entrepreneurship, design and creativity. Here, Alba has brought together a coworking space, café, a zone for design objects, an event stage and a creative studio.

A democratic laboratory for ideas in the prestigious Avenue Louise district. The press conference at AME officially opened Brussels Design Week.

AME is also particularly interesting for Brussels Design Week because it is hosting an exhibition devoted to Alain Gilles. Almost twenty years ago, Gilles entered the world of design from a completely different professional background. He studied political science, worked in finance – at Euroclear, the very institution where Russian assets are currently frozen – and only in 2007 founded his own design studio. It is a classic story of a bourgeois family imagining a respectable future for its obedient son: a career in finance, which he duly delivered – for his mother. Then his passion for creativity took over. With a financial safety net, naturally.

Today, his name is associated above all with furniture, lighting and objects in which functionality meets sculptural expression. The exhibition Almost 20 is more intelligently conceived than the usual anniversary retrospective. Gilles deliberately steers almost entirely clear of his celebrated early works, focusing instead on pieces created over the past three years. The exhibition therefore reads as a portrait of the designer in the present tense. You can see his language evolving: there is more wood, tactility and serenity, while his familiar geometric clarity acquires a warmer character.

“Simplexity” is the term Gilles uses to describe his approach. An object should be immediately understandable at first glance, yet reveal additional layers of meaning and form on closer inspection. That is precisely why his furniture at AME invites you to decode it. Gilles has left us clues, little keys to each design object. My favourite is the poolside chaise longue, crowned with a halo at the headrest – an object that brings to mind both Madame Récamier’s famous chaise longue and garden furniture.

In the exhibition Les Jardinier.es du Vide, artist Zélie Boulestreau presents a series of recycled-paper bas-reliefs – sculptures created especially for the Van Eyck gallery as part of Brussels Design Week. As an artist and designer, Boulestreau works in response to a specific space and its context, so Papier Boulettes here becomes a kind of investigation of the place itself.

Her practice grows out of reflections on how we inhabit the Earth in an age of climate crisis, dwindling resources and weakened ecosystems. In April 2026, during a residency in Mexico at the educational farm Terreno Familiar, Boulestreau explored ecological building techniques and methods of syntropic reforestation. Working alongside artists and designers from the Oaxaca region, she became acquainted with local craft traditions, working with raw earth and natural fibres. She added recycled paper to these materials, expanding her own material vocabulary. This is where her new motifs emerge: dense, almost tactile compositions evocative of oases and gardens.

At the heart of Boulestreau’s work lies the idea of horror vacui – the “fear of emptiness”, the historical notion that nature abhors a void. The artist reinterprets this principle from a contemporary ecological perspective: her bas-reliefs literally fill the surface with life, turning the decorative motif of the garden into a reflection on ecosystems and our relationship with them.

And the gigantic Atelier Papier Boulettes panel at the MIX hotel is my favourite work in the series. Here, the same principle operates on an architectural scale, transforming an entire wall into a fantastical garden.

Shifting Ground: A Garden Party is one of the most intriguing projects of Brussels Design Week. This year, it returns to USquare for the second time, bringing together around thirty Belgian and European designers. But this is not a conventional group exhibition: the very idea of a garden party becomes its artistic scenario – a space for meeting, conversation, making and shared experience.

Behind the festive façade lies a rather precise question: what does it mean to celebrate at a time when social, economic and creative freedom are becoming increasingly fragile? Traditionally associated with a privileged social circle, the garden party is reimagined by Shifting Ground as a critical yet poetic gesture – an invitation to consider how we come together, and what can genuinely give us a reason to celebrate today.

I like the fact that the exhibition exists alongside the working studios of USquare: design here remains connected to the process of making. Among the participants are Aiko, Alizee Rubino, Anna Tou, Ariane Van Dievoet, Grammar Furniture, Guillaume Slizewicz, Julia Lok, ROVER, Studio Minimètre and others. As a result, A Garden Party feels more like a living landscape of diverse practices than a tightly structured exhibition.

And perhaps this is precisely the right setting for such a project. A former military barracks, USquare has been transformed into an open creative and community complex where design coexists with workshops, research and everyday life.

The Dominican is hosting The Secular Chapel, presented by the Rempart44 gallery. In this lively hotel, located opposite the service entrance to the Opera House, the “design chapel” offers an unexpected pause – an invitation to stop, slow down and enter a contemplative, almost prayerful state.

Here, religious experience moves into the realm of contemporary design. The objects brought together by Rempart44 become contemporary altars, relics and symbols, inviting the viewer to contemplate rather than simply look. The Dominican itself intensifies the effect: its former monastic architecture retains the memory of a place of prayer, while the exhibition translates that atmosphere into the language of contemporary design.

The Secular Chapel invites us to experience design as an object of attention, reflection and an almost ritual encounter. And in the busy heart of Brussels, this unexpected “chapel” genuinely works as a small pause in the city.