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At the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, orientalist architecture was literally all over Europe - and Belgium, with its well-known fancy for Art Nouveau, did not lag behind. Not alone were a great number of the design motifs used in Art Nouveau, by Victor Horta among many others, oriental by inspiration - the commisioning of complete copies of oriental buildings had become a real trend, ever since the Belgian King Leopold II had turned Brussels, until then a provincial town, into the capital of a modern empire (or this was, at least, what the King imagined) which would compete in its grandness with Paris and London.

In consequence, the global village became a matter-of-fact in Belgian architecture, more than a century before it would be coined as a word with the advent of information technology. In the course of just a few decades, Belgium got dotted with Chinese Pavillions, Japanese Towers, Egyptian Temples and more architectural parafernalia taken from the mythical and mystical worlds beyond the borders of most people's imagination - many of which have since disappeared without much commotion, but some of which are still to be seen in Brussels as well as in Belgium's second-level cities of Liege, Ghent, and Antwerpen.

As to the Islamic World, inspiration from it was generated mostly when constructing buildings for the fastly growing leisure industry, which seemed to have a natural inclination towards make-belief and the fantasies of a thousand-and-one nights. At the Antwerpen De Keyserlei, the Theatre de l'Alhambra and the Theatre Palais Indien flanked one another, while in Brussels, the Cinema Pathe Palace on the Avenue Anspach and the Cinama Plaza on the Boulevard Adolphe Max (both sadly disappeared) were just two of a growing series of public buildings with Almohad interiors and hybrid Moorish facades.

In private houses, the Art Nouveau arabesques were mostly limited to the odd smoking room or garden pavillion, often but whimsical additions to furthermore classical Victorian houses. As a matter of fact, when the Antwerp orientalist architect Huygh (1885-1946) decided to build for himself a replica of the Alhambra in the newly developed suburb Deurne, he was spoken of as an eccentric coming close to going bananas altogether. How could he have expected that ever he would be commissioned to build more of the same for one of his many private clients?

But then, he accidently met the  Buerbaum family. Wealthy, famous and Jewish - a golden combination, so it would soon turn out. For the Jewish community, the orientalist move in architecture had a very special attraction. For even if it was loaded with Islamic motifs, it was reminiscent of European Jewry's golden age, when under the Almohads in Morocco and in Spain the Jewish community had penetrated into even the highest layers of society. The Buerbaum House in Berchem, today Bayt al-Andalus, would soon become a showcase of orientalist extravaganza - and today it is the only example of its kind which has withstood more than a century of urban demolitions and modernist renovation folly.