What happened
De Drie Koningen stands opposite the church at Houtave, a village in the polders north of Bruges, and it is one of the few pubs anywhere on this site whose age rests on a document rather than a sign. The Flemish heritage inventory quotes a property inventory of 1654 describing "eenen huys ende herberge, mette schueren ende stallingen [..] genoempt de Drye Coninghen" — a house and inn with its barns and stables, called the Three Kings. The building is seventeenth-century, long miscatalogued as eighteenth, and was extended in the 1780s by the Coudeville family, whose name and the date 1785 are on it. Through the nineteenth century it was the village’s large inn and restaurant, and until the Second World War it held plays, weddings, funeral meals and the meetings of the Houtave council. It has been a protected monument since 2004 and stands inside the protected village centre. New owners took it on and announced a reopening for the spring of 2024.
What is there now
Closed and under restoration, slowly. The reopening planned for spring 2024 was delayed when the building’s recognition as a protected monument required a heritage management plan for the centre of Houtave, which the Flemish government approved in February 2026. Nothing since has reported the work finished. If it opens, the 1654 inventory makes it one of the best-documented old pubs in Belgium.
Location recorded from OpenStreetMap way 742425714, the house at Kerkhofstraat 17 in Houtave, the address the Crossroads Bank holds the Drie Koningen businesses at (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/742425714).
Sources
- Flanders heritage inventoryinventaris.onroerenderfgoed.be
- kenniswest.be
- kenniswest.be
- openstreetmap.org
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