In 1926 the Panneels family asked the Diegem artist Victor Servranckx (1897-1965), a pioneer of abstract art, to design a building for their wholesale business: export warehouses, offices and a garage for processing and transporting chicory, at Oude Haachtsesteenweg 89. The building was entered in the land register that same year. It is known as the ‘Cubist House’.
The building stands in a fairly monumental position on the east side of the so-called ‘Plaats’. It is three storeys high, under flat roofs, and plays on the contrast between dark brick and white render: two white cubes seem to have been slid into the brick volume, one at the upper west corner and one on the east side. The staggered volumes belong to the modernism of the inter-war years.
After the First World War there was a need to build quickly and cheaply, with new materials and standardised parts. You can see this in the windows: their frames consist of rows of equal squares, chosen for economic and rational reasons rather than for the play of light. Later part of the building served as a garage with a petrol pump, the ‘Garage de Diegem’. The joinery has since been renewed.