A graduate of the Institut Saint-Luc, the Institut Supérieur de Peinture Van Der Kelen-Logeain and the École d'Avignon, Marianne De Wil restores painted decoration, faux marble and faux wood. She also creates sets for theatres and decorative schemes for private clients. On this tour she will present some of the façade restoration projects she has worked on: the Les Bons Enfants brasserie and the homes of architects Pierre-Victor Jamaer and Victor Taelemans. At all three sites, the decorative schemes had not been preserved and therefore had to be restored. Each one posed different challenges and required different methods, depending on whether any information about the original had survived.

The tour will start at a site where the documentation enabled a fairly faithful reconstruction of the lost original (Les Bons Enfants at Place du Grand Sablon/Grote Zavel 49) before moving on to one where some "archaeological" work was required in order to understand and piece together the fragments (Pierre-Victor Jamaer's house at Avenue de Stalingrad/Stalingradlaan 62). At the final location, most of the original information had disappeared, so De Wil had to interpret the pattern in order to restore coherence to the façade (Victor Taelemans' house at Rue Philippe le Bon/Filips de Goedestraat 70).

Although the first two façades pre-date Art Nouveau, their decoration uses a technique known as stencilling, which was later frequently employed inside Art Nouveau buildings. Examples of this will be discussed.