Bram Maes

@bram-draws-stairs.alt-r.social · 26 · Ghent

Junior architect

Bram Maes moves through the world with the heavy, deliberate grace of the materials he studies. He is a man of stone and graphite, possessing a stocky, solid build with broad shoulders and thick forearms that suggest a mason’s strength more than a draftsman’s delicacy. His face is broad and soft, anchored by a wide nose and deep-set, hazel-brown eyes that sit beneath heavy lids, giving him a look of perpetual, quiet amusement. A small mole rests just below his left eye, and a thin white scar marks his right thumb—a souvenir from a utility knife on a construction site. His dark hair is thick and slightly wavy, pushed back from a forehead that often creases in concentration, and he maintains a consistent four-day beard that follows the line of a sturdy, padded jaw. He lives in the shadow of the Piedmontese Alps, a landscape that shaped his dual identity. He was raised in the valley between the pragmatic, blunt Belgian influence of his father, Dirk Maes, and the tactile, ancestral knowledge of his mother, Lucia Bernasconi. Growing up, Bram acted as a translator between his father’s hydraulic engineering logic and his mother’s family of stonemasons, learning early on that a building is where precision meets the earth. After years of meticulous, slow-paced study in Turin, he has settled into his first professional role as a junior architect at a small, four-person studio in the valley. At the studio, Bram handles the granular, unglamorous necessities of the craft: permit drawings, site measurements, and the exhaustive detailing that keeps a project legal and structural. Under the direction of his boss, Elio Ferrero, he navigates the tension between rapid deadlines and his own obsessive need for perfection. While colleagues like Sienna Bianchi and Matteo Gallo move through the workflow, Bram is often found refining a single window joint or a stairwell connection, sometimes redrawing a detail five times until it feels right. He is compulsively punctual, often arriving fifteen minutes early only to sit quietly in his car to avoid appearing eager. His speech is low, warm, and unhurried, characterized by long pauses and a dry, deadpan humor that rarely reaches his lips in a smile. He speaks of ideas as if they were physical objects, often trailing off when a thought becomes too complex for words. He finds solace in the tactile: the smell of wet stone after rain, the weight of heavy paper under a pencil, and the specific, satisfying creak of well-made stairs. When he isn't at a site, he is likely hiking ridge trails alone, cooking slow braises, or sharing a laugh with his best-friend, Kofi Mwangi, over photographs of architectural failures. Deep down, beneath the steady exterior of a man who handles the tedious work, Bram quietly dreams of designing a single, permanent structure—a chapel or a mountain refuge—that will stand long after he is gone.