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At the end of the 19th century, it was not at all uncommon for the Jewish community in Antwerpen to be fairly engaged in public life. As a matter of fact, the boundaries between communities then seem to have been far less restrictive than they would become in later days. Take for example Jozef Buerbaum (1860-1936), of the Buerbaum-Van der Goten publishing house, who in 1895 founded the Onpartijdige Bond der Antwersche Neringdoenders en Ambachtslieden (Independent Union of Antwerp Commercial Entrepreneurs and Skilled Workers), and was as active in local politics as he was as a writer and a publisher.

In any case, the Buerbaums were well-off, and it should come as no surprise that the family quickly gained interest in the new upper middle-class developments in Berchem, then the outskirts of Antwerp, but still within the fortification walls established by Brialmont (1789-1885). It was there, in 1909, that Leonard Buerbaum commissioned the architects A. Lenaerts and F. De Meyer to build a house, which would be classical at the outside (and quite undistinguishable from the other houses in the street), but hybrid, and orientalist in its interior.

Indeed, to build houses in Almohad (Morocco-Andalusian) style was common practice for Jewish families in those days, since this reflected the heydays of Jewish wealth and social status, enjoyed under the Almohad rulers in Northern Africa and the Spanish Peninsula well up to 1492, when the Fall of Granada marked both the end of Europe's most flourishing multicultural society and the beginning of the dark years of the Spanish Inquisition.

And so it was, that behind the inconspicious front door of the Buerbaum family house, the interior became more orientalist as one penetrated deeper. The front room, mostly in French Rococo, merges into pillared Granada arches leading to a set of entirely Almohad inner rooms, complete with arched gates, muqarnas, wall paintings and Arabic inscriptions lauding the invincibility of Allah (La Ghalib ila-Allah!). In 1920, Buerbaum again went one step further, when he asked the architects Ernest Dieltiens and Maurice Huygh to construct a copy of the famous Alhambra Lion Patio in his garden, turning the entire ground floor into an orientalist fantasy never seen before in a city like Antwerpen. 

Since 1920, the house has remained untouched, and when, in 2005, Francis Laleman and Michaela Broeckx bought the property from the widow of the renowned Antwerp Legal Expert Van Alsenoy, they found it in its original, albeit fairly dilapidated condition, as one of the last remaining vestiges of a whimsical orientalist style which had attracted so many well-to-do citizens nearly a hundred years earlier.