Amsterdam is famous for its 17th-century canal houses. As a resident, I still get a little thrill riding by the Grachtengordel (Canal Belt) on the way to a Saturday night movie or lunch with friends. Plus, since we’ve started house-hunting, I’ve managed to peek (online) into canalside apartments, partially satisfying my never-ending curiosity about them.
But unless you have deeply lined pockets (or a fat expat package), canal houses are mostly off limits to regular folk—particularly those on the Herengracht, or Lords’ Canal. The Herengracht has been ultra-prime real estate since the 1700s—a fact documented in a now-famous study called the Herengracht Index, a 400-year overview of property prices by Dutch professor Piet Echholtz from the University of Maastricht.
Herengracht houses are proper mansions, so large and highly priced that individuals can rarely afford them; most of their owners today are law firms, banks or cultural foundations.
That’s why Open Monumentendag (Heritage Days) is so fantastic. It’s a weekend in September when the Netherlands opens over 4,000 designated monuments (54 in Amsterdam alone) to the public. Since it’s highly unlikely that I would ever own, rent or work in a Herengracht house, this was the perfect (and only!) opportunity for me to finally see inside these 17th-century mansions.
Share my voyeuristic pleasure. Please.
Herengracht was where the richest and most powerful individuals of Holland’s Golden Age lived. As befitting their status, they lived in a world of double-wide mansions with double-height ceilings, stately gardens…
… labyrinths and coach houses. Imagining the splendor of that era just makes me starry-eyed.
The Netherlands’ Ministry of Culture, through a panel that governs the preservation of monument buildings, strictly regulates the upkeep and renovation of properties on the “monumentenlijst.” This enables original details—such as from subtle sea green tiling in the kitchen to stunning ceiling paintings in this office in Herengracht 480—to be meticulously maintained.
Priceless paintings, such as these oil landscapes by Jurriaan Andressen, also line the walls of Herengracht 386—now a museum documenting the history of Amsterdam canal houses, called Het Grachtenhuis. (Another great canal house museum on the Herengracht: the Museum Willet-Holthuys.)
Not quite as grand but no less beautiful are the ceiling details inside Herengracht 415, home of Het Boekmanstichting, a library and study center for art, culture and policy. The cozy reading room has lovely stained-glass windows, too.
I love to see the traditional bumping up against the modern, such as in the office of J. Van Stigt, an award-winning architecture practice that specializes in the restoration, renovation and revival of designated monuments. They held a special exhibition of their projects that really made me wish I had a wider Dutch vocabulary.
Everyone has an opinion about the Dutch, but as a Manila girl I will always admire how decisively they acted to put a stop to flooding and preserve their heritage. How I wish we could get our act together and do the same!
Related reading: The New York Times has a fascinating article on the Herengracht Index, including a summary of the canal’s history and the Index’s findings. Long, but a great read.
I work on the Herengracht so I get to pass these buildings every day but I’ve never been in one. Great photos.
Lucky you Stu! (Hey, that rhymes.) Thanks for stopping by… flattered that the Leader of Holland has graced my blog with his presence!