Architecture Cotugno Thiry has transformed a 19th-century brewery building in Belgium into La Bouteillerie, a simple house with rugged brick walls.
Located beside the Lhomme river in the village of Jemelle, the building was constructed in 1895 and originally used for bottling beer produced by the brewery.

The brewery site has been owned by the family of Jean-Denis Thiry ? co-founder of Architecture Cotugno Thiry, with Rita Cotugno ? for five generations. The owners decided that the building would be better served as a residential property for rent.
Transforming it from an industrial relic into family home involved stripping the building back to its core structure.

"The only limits were a relatively tight budget, and a request to have three bedrooms to maximise the rental return," Thiry told Dezeen. "We wanted to keep the spirit of the place, as it was built at the time in 1895." "The idea was to give the project a sense of timelessness, by proposing only a few simple tones and materials. We wanted to highlight the old brick vaults, formerly covered with plaster, and draw attention to the beautiful vegetation and tall trees surrounding the building."

One of the biggest challenges was opening up the ground floor, which had been divided into small rooms by a series of partitions added after the original construction.
Another was restoring key parts of the structure, including the steel beams on each floor that had corroded with time and an area...