Naalden House in Best purchased

 

Hendrick de Keyser Society, Amsterdam, 3rd of January 2013. Participants BankGiro Lottery enable special purchase. 

Hendrick de Keyser Society acquires remarkable monument by the founder of the “Bossche School”
 

 

The Hendrick de Keyser Society, the nationally operating organization dedicated to the preservation of historic houses, has acquired 'Huis Naalden' (Naalden House) in Best. The house dating from 1982 is one of the most important monuments of the 'Bossche School' style of architecture from the second half of the 20th century, a movement in Dutch architecture which also recognized internationally. 

 
 

Dom Hans van der Laan                                                                                                                                           Photograph: Arjan Bronkhorst

Benedictine Monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan (1904-1991), founder of the Bossche School, has a small but beautiful oeuvre. The house in Best is his only dwelling house in the Netherlands. It was designed shortly after Van der Laan’s architectural theory “Architectonic Space” was published. The design is a statement of Van der Laan about how a house should be built and on his views on size, shape and space based on the “plastic number”. Van der Laan called his design “a test of architectonicl space”.

 
 

Naalden House completely breaks with the Dutch house typology. It was built as a composition of volumes around a courtyard. It consists of four components: a room (living room), a long wing (bedrooms, kitchen and sanitary facilities), an open gallery (which can also serve as a garage) and a garden wall. Together they form the private courtyard. In a fountain in the hallway an inscription reads “het buiten in de ban van het binnen”, which roughly translates into “The outside captivated within”, a consice characterization of the house. 

 
 

 

The Hendrick de Keyser Society is committed to preserving outstanding historic houses and only buys houses on the open market in very exceptional cases. The purchase of House Naalden has been made possible with support from the BankGiro Lottery, the culture-lottery of the Netherlands. The acquisition fits within the policy of 'Hendrick de Keyser' to selectively expand its collection with acclaimed 20th-century Dutch architecture. This collection also includes houses by Gerrit Rietveld, Sybold van Ravesteyn, Ben Merkelbach and Abe Bonnema, amongst others.
 

Attention! This building can be viewed as a 3D model which enables you to virtually walk through the house.