Putberg Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

The Putberg Castle is an eclectic brick villa-château in the Flemish neo-Renaissance style, built in 1878 in Asse (Flemish Brabant) for Leon De Coster, Catholic member of parliament and then mayor of the town from 1895 to 1921. It stands on the southern edge of the Putberg, a former sandstone quarry area, on farmland: the 1879 Ordnance Survey map already marks it as a "country house", accompanied by a landscaped pleasure garden that occupied the slopes to the south. In 1904, De Coster exchanged the estate for that of Vijverbeek, which Viscount Théophile de Lantsheere had just acquired; Lantsheere was a former Minister of Justice and governor of the National Bank of Belgium. The estate was sold in 1941 to a company from Aalst, which had part of the trees felled, and then resold in 1943 to Eugène Van der Haegen, the first mayor of Asse after the war. The château, badly damaged by the stay of German, British and Canadian soldiers, was then fully restored. It still belongs to the Van der Haegen family today: a private property, it forms part of a landscaped park completed by a large pond.