How I ended up here.
I grew up in the Austrian Alps and lived there until I was twenty-four. I have been in Belgium for ten years now, four of them in Antwerp. Before pilates I worked in sales and marketing, with a master’s in management behind me.
I have done pilates for years, and movement has always been the thread running through my life. At a certain point my job stopped giving me what I was looking for: I wanted to mean something for people’s wellbeing, and for women in particular. What struck me was how little there is for women that looks at more than the workout alone. As if a body only needs to be trained, and not also carried through a pregnancy, a recovery or a transition. That is where Studio Bij ’t Vuur came from: a small studio next to the Groenkwartier in Antwerp. The name is my surname — Bij ’t Vuur, ‘by the fire’ — and it happens to say exactly what I want here: warmth, calm, and something that keeps burning.
