At number 10 Meir, where Antwerp's premier shopping boulevard meets the shadow of the Handelsbeurs — the sixteenth-century commodities exchange that effectively invented modern capitalism — a pale stone neoclassical mansion has been transformed into Hotel FRANQ, one of the city's most carefully considered small hotels. The facade visible in the images carries all the formal apparatus of Flemish bourgeois architecture: carved cartouches, barred windows, ornamental ironwork, and an entrance framed by gas-style lanterns that hold their own against the grandeur of the surrounding streetscape. The interior navigates a tension familiar to Belgian boutique hotels — how to honour the bones of a historic building without retreating into period pastiche. Light oak herringbone floors run through the restaurant, where tan leather chairs surround white-clothed tables beneath a richly illustrated botanical wallmural of tropical birds and foliage, a floor-to-ceiling wine cabinet anchoring the room's more contemporary sensibility. Guest rooms, dressed in warm stone and off-white plaster, pair dark-upholstered platform beds with terracotta armchairs and campaign-style desks in a palette that feels considered rather than curated-by-committee. The rear courtyard, walled in whitewash with cobbled paving and black Fermob-style café chairs, frames a stepped Flemish gable from the adjacent historic fabric — a reminder that in Antwerp's old centre, the past has a habit of appearing just over the garden wall.

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