HUIS VDH is a collaborative house in the making where you don’t pay rent but you put time and ideas in an open sourced environment.
Repurposing space above commercial locations to become social, cultural and technological experimental labs in the hearth of Brussels.
Huis VDH started around November 2015 when I asked the owner of Bonnefooi if I could work on repurposing the space above Bonnefooi. I wanted to start an experimental process to give the three floors a new life through common principles, sustainable design and open source thinking. After talking with a few dozen of people, 5 people formed the first network.
The premise: find out through a collaborative way of work how different people can repurpose an empty space an share own project and collective ones to better the way we live in Brussels. We took inspiration out of Fablabs, Livinglabs, coworkingspace and are testing out every tool they are proposing to see which ones fit in this space.
On the long term we want to become an example that can be reproduced in any space above a shop in Brussels. And the numbers are in our favour, cause as much as 10 000m2 is inaccessible but also unused space that could bring a maker and creative community back to the city center.
At this point we are 6 months further and have a working core team with a broth network of all kind of social, cultural and technological organizations around us. Huis VDH has already a few projects in his pipeline and funded her own restoration of some parts of the first and third room.
Now we would love to invite other people from the edgeryders network to see if there is any interest in this project and could be used for the community.