Most visitors to Namur expect cobbled streets and seventeenth-century houses, and find them — but the Quartier des Carmes, just south of the cathedral, is a surprise: a small but coherent district of Art Deco houses, banks and shopfronts built mostly in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was developed on the site of an old Carmelite convent (the name "Carmes" survives from the order) and largely escaped the wartime damage that flattened so much of central Belgium.
Stroll along Rue de Fer and Rue Saint-Loup to spot wrought-iron balconies, mosaic fanlights, stained-glass insets and the occasional surviving period interior. It is the kind of district you only really notice if someone tells you to look; well worth half an hour.