A summer day in Brussels begins, ideally, on foot, exploring the rhythm of a city changed by the season. Early morning flower markets fill the Place du Grand-Sablon, open-air concerts take over the parks, friendly boules competitions gather under the trees. At the heart of it all, a near neighbour to the Grand-Place, sits Hotel Amigo – the perfect starting point for an adventure in any direction.
But today, and for only a few weeks of the summer, our destination is the Royal Palace, whose gilded doors are closed to the public for most of the year. From Belgian National Day on 21 July through early September, they swing open, as they have each summer since 1965 — a welcome from a monarchy that wears its grandeur softly, closer to the texture of daily life than the theatre of other European courts.
Set out from the hotel and you are waved off by the doormen, clad in hats designed by Fabienne Delvigne, milliner to Queen Mathilde and holder of a Belgian Royal Warrant since 2001. It is a small introduction to the city of makers that lies beyond, where royal patronage has long sustained the workshops, ateliers and trade houses of Brussels.
Indeed, the hotel holds its own royal history. It was built in 1957 by the Blatons, a Belgian dynasty of builders and hoteliers, to receive visiting royalty for the 1958 World's Fair. When it came into the care of the Forte family, a quarter of a century ago, it was one hospitality lineage passing the 'Blaton' to another — and the sincere warmth of that succession carries through to today. Of particular importance to Sir Rocco Forte, the Blaton legacy is still present, from original artworks of their private collection to the top-floor Blaton Suite, its private terrace overlooking the Gothic Town Hall.
Your morning stroll takes you through the leafy Parc de Bruxelles, perhaps rewarded with a glimpse of a royal family member cycling into the city. The Palace, after all, is a working palace rather than a home: the family lives at Laeken, and the king travels in each morning. Inside, summer visitors pass through the Throne Room with its low reliefs by Auguste Rodin, the Mirror Room — its ceiling famously installed with the iridescent wing-cases of nearly 1.5 million jewel beetles by Belgian artist Jan Fabre — and the marble Grand Staircase designed by Alphonse Balat for King Leopold II. Each room records the makers the crown has chosen to call upon, across centuries of patronage.
Balat's most ambitious work for Leopold II lies a few miles north, at the Serres Royales de Laeken, well worth the short journey out from the city. Begun in 1873 and built in iron and glass over thirty years, the greenhouses form a sequence of domed pavilions and vaulted galleries, a glass city set in the royal park. They open to visitors for around three weeks each spring, an annual window into one of the most remarkable architectural commissions in Europe — and one that, through Balat's apprentice Victor Horta, would go on to give the language of Art Nouveau its founding vocabulary.
Back in the heart of the city, the royal patronage of the Belgian crown is found in elegant boutiques as well as state rooms. Step into the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert – opened in 1847 by King Leopold I as one of Europe's earliest covered shopping arcades – and the air carries the faint sweetness of chocolate. Neuhaus, holder of a Royal Warrant, has traded here since 1857; it was on this very spot, in 1912, that Jean Neuhaus Jr. invented the famous Belgian praline. A few streets away, Delvaux, the world's oldest luxury leather goods house, has supplied the Belgian Royal Court since 1883, a partnership now in its third century. A reminder that the most enduring craft houses in Brussels still trace their authority to the same source.
This is what summer in Brussels reveals: a capital where royal heritage is threaded through chocolate boutiques, milliners' ateliers and leather workshops that have outlasted dynasties. Explore it from Hotel Amigo, a refined base at the heart of it all.
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