Three years ago, the Belgian gallerist Scott Lippens moved into a fifth-floor Art Deco apartment in the south of Antwerp. Lippens had been working for a biotech firm owned by his mother’s family – “the family business,” Lippens calls it – but the work was unfulfilling, and this new Antwerp apartment represented a fresh start. When he moved in, he populated the home with pieces of contemporary design – chairs, vases, other decorative items – and invited people over to take a look. “We put on a lot of dinners,” he says, “for architects, for potential clients…” The dinners were both a way for Lippens to gain access to the city’s creative community, which is thriving, and to introduce his new gallery, Uppercut, which trades in beautifully crafted, mostly one-off pieces of furniture and design. Architects were invited to consider items they might buy to fill new homes. Private clients, including the fashion designer Dries Van Noten, whose business has been based in Antwerp for decades, began to purchase chairs. The only thing not for sale in the apartment was a large sofa in the living room – and Lippens’s bed. Everything else might as well have had a barcode on it.
