Delvaux lets Hans Op de Beeck fill its Brussels workshops with an ash-gray sculpture garden

Delvaux has installed a body of work by Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck inside its Brussels headquarters, and there is nothing to buy. The pieces went in over the summer, some beside the workbenches and some threaded through the atelier itself, forming what the artist calls an ash-gray indoor garden around the maison's leather artisans.

The centerpiece is a life-sized sculpture of a bald 11-year-old boy, seated cross-legged on a rock at one end of a long oval lily pond, cradling a glass orb. Bamboo stands, a woebegone girl with angel wings, and a plaster to-go cup on a plinth surround him, all cast in the artist's signature ash gray.

Delvaux chief executive Jean-Marc Loubier framed the project as a deliberate departure from the usual brand and art tie-up. "We prefer not to sell, but to share what we stand for," he said, adding that he hopes the installation endures for about a year inside the maison's headquarters, a former military vehicle repair depot known as Arsenal.

The audience is narrow by design. Delvaux built the installation for the benefit of its 150 Brussels employees, its worldwide business partners and its VICs, all by invitation only, rather than for a paying public or a retail rollout of merchandise carrying the artist's name.

A bespoke soundtrack of plaintive music plays through the atelier, mixing with the intermittent sound of hammering from the workbenches. Op de Beeck said this marks the first time he has installed his own work inside an actual place of business rather than a gallery, museum or fair booth.

Where the two Belgian names actually meet

Loubier discovered the connection almost by accident. At Art Basel last June he found that Op de Beeck had already worked a Delvaux Brillant top-handle bag into one of his own sculptures, a woman in a 1950s-style dress seated on a chaise longue with the bag at her feet, without ever asking permission.

That same sculpture became the hero image for Op de Beeck's solo show at Almine Rech's Brussels gallery, which opened the same week. The Brillant itself dates to 1958, unveiled at the World's Fair beside the Atomium, a period the artist described as one of naive optimism and a belief in progress and science.

Op de Beeck puts the Brillant on the same design pedestal as an Eames chair. "It's at that level," he said, adding that Delvaux's restraint, making a small range of things with dedication rather than many, matches the discipline he brings to his own casting and film work.

A house older than the Birkin it gets compared to

Delvaux was founded in 1829 and has been an official supplier to the Royal Belgian Court since 1883, making it, by its own account, the oldest fine leather goods house still in operation. Richemont has controlled the brand since 2021, after Loubier first invested alongside First Heritage Brands in 2011.

When Loubier arrived, Delvaux exported just 3 percent of its production; the house now sends 85 percent of sales outside Belgium, a shift Loubier says was necessary to catch up with luxury's globalization. It now runs about 50 freestanding stores and shop-in-shops worldwide, expanding deliberately rather than quickly.

We have written before about the Delvaux Tempête, a 1967 design that predates the Hermès Birkin by 17 years and shares its belted, angular silhouette, in our roundup of the best Birkin alternatives available without a waitlist. That earlier coverage framed Delvaux mainly through its bags rather than its broader identity as a maison.

This installation pushes the opposite way. Loubier said the goal is for people to understand that Delvaux is meaningful beyond manufacturing and beyond the product itself, as a maison, a brand and a legacy that he says the house enriches rather than simply preserves.

What happens once the Brussels run ends

Loubier said the collaboration will extend to Delvaux's New York flagship on Fifth Avenue, where an installation is set to debut in November and run through the holiday period. No details of that version's scale or contents have been given beyond the timing.

Op de Beeck said he is drawn to what he calls in-between moments, when a person is not performing a social role, and hopes the works offer visitors a moment of calm, solace and silent reflection rather than spectacle. Gray, he noted, can read as dystopian, but he finds it soothing.

There is no packaged product at the end of this. Delvaux is treating the installation as a statement of values rather than a marketing vehicle, a wager that an elite handbag maker's reputation can be built as much on what it refuses to sell as on what it does.