The Donjon on the Broekstraat is today a brasserie, restaurant and hotel. With its crenellated corner tower the building looks medieval, but its story is that of a ducal mill, a farm and an inn.
The Duke's Mill
Downstream of the Voorde, where the Donjon now stands, lay the Duke's Mill. In the 13th century it belonged to Reynier van Haeren, but on the Tuesday after Easter 1285 Duke John I took it over. From then on it was a ban mill: the inhabitants of Diegem, Haren, Machelen and Melsbroek had to have their grain ground there. The duke leased the mill out for a few years at a time; the rent was paid in measures of rye and pounds of wax.
On 28 May 1477 the mill was leased by public auction in Mechelen ‘by the candle’: after the last bid a wax candle two inches long was lit, and whoever made the highest bid before it went out won the lease. In 1545 the miller's wife Anna Stroobant told the Chamber of Accounts how she had fled with her family from the troops of Maarten van Rossem and how her husband had been shot dead; her arrears were cancelled. In 1578 Spanish soldiers set the mill on fire. The last trace dates from 1772.
From Vermeren farm to Donjon
The Ferraris map of 1777 shows the ‘cense Vermeren’ here, a quit-rent farm then owned by Count Vilain XIV. The gable stone bears the year 1762. The turret that gives the building its medieval look was probably added only at the end of the 19th century. According to a story for which no source is known, the lords of Diegem built a hunting lodge here around 1500, where princes and even Rubens later stayed; in any case the story does not fully add up, since Rubens died in 1640, before Beaulieu was built.
At the start of the 20th century it became an inn with an atmospheric taproom. A Brussels company, through a certain Mr Matheussens, turned it into a ‘Laiterie’, hotel and restaurant for a wealthy Brussels clientele, and dug the large pond. After the First World War Marie Louise Van Peteghem ran the ‘Laiterie du Donjon’, then Ferdinand Barbier, and from 1940 Henri Bekaert kept a family boarding house there. During the works on the Woluwe (1930-1935) the ponds were reduced and many trees felled. In 1957 the Wanson company bought the property and tastefully furnished it as a guest house. Since 1998 the Donjon has belonged to the municipality.