Grimbergen - Care project

The Eigen Huis npo was set up in 1975 as a centre for the integration of disabled people and it has developed a number of activities to achieve this. In 1980, it started with a collective housing project for thirty adults with serious physical disabilities. A Special Transport Service provides door-to-door transport for the residents and all the people of limited mobility in the district of Halle-Vilvoorde. The Community Centre organises socio-cultural activities that are open to a broader public. And finally, the Mobile Assistance and Support Unit helps people with disabilities, the ill and the elderly, mainly outside their normal home environment.

The Eigen Huis npo has 78 staff. The independence and self-sufficiency of the residents is a priority. Most of them depend on wheelchairs and their disabilities change, so that their needs in the housing units also evolve.

The current Eigen Huis housing and the community centre are located in a residential area with the aim of encouraging integration. This building now no longer appears sufficient for the purpose. So the Eigen Huis npo is planning a new building on the same site, one whose siting, organisation and design underpins the client’s mission to the full. This new building must fit into a vision for the future of the whole site, where the Heilig Hart Grimbergen npo also wants to build a group of homes for assisted living for 66 elderly people.

The Heilig Hart npo in Grimbergen, established in 1891, considers its main task to be caring for our aging fellow men and women in the region and in the borough of Grimbergen. The npo takes this task to heart, and is thus making 163 housing units available, plus a broad range of services during the residents’ stay in the residential care centre. When it comes to caring for the elderly, the 140 members of staff at the npo are inspired by a holistic vision of man and over the years they have succeeded in building up a good image and a sound reputation throughout the region.

The Heilig Hart npo in Grimbergen, 500 m from the site in Schildpadstraat, specialises in providing in-house care to elderly people who are demented or in serious physical need. The npo also organises forms of care by various bodies, such as short stays and day-care, and aims to diversify the range of care services offered to support home-care even more, by means of a group of 66 assisted-living homes for the elderly on the Eigen Huis site. These homes are the final element in the range of multi-institutional forms of care offered by the Heilig Hart npo and are a major source of support to the volunteer carers at home and also offer users the guarantee of being able to stay longer in their familiar home environment.

Both organisations take as their basic outlook the notion that every form of housing on the Eigen Huis site has the aim making the residents’ daily life and individual life project possible and promoting the social integration and emancipation of the residents. In addition to their specific task, both npos want to build collective infrastructure that builds bridges between the two facilities in terms of architecture, organisation and function. These communal areas will be used for reception, cafeteria, conference rooms, hairdressing salon, meeting place, wellness, etc. The key words for the three projects are accessibility, self-sufficiency, sustainability, homeliness, openness, flexibility and solidarity.

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