INTRODUCTION
When the house on the Keizersgracht came to us, it still held three centuries of other people’s decisions. There were two ways to make a hotel of it. One was to empty it and begin again. The other was slower and more expensive, and it is the one we chose.
This is a short account of that choice: of the year spent looking before anything was touched, of the one thing that was never in question, and of everything that had to be hidden so that the old house could stay in plain sight.
CHAPTER ONE
The argument
When the house came to us it had been a family home for most of a century, a shipping office before that, and before that a warehouse with a hoist beam in the gable. Each of those lives had left something behind. The first year of the restoration produced almost no building work at all. It produced lists: of what was original, of what was merely old, and of what we would have to be very sure about before we moved it.
CHAPTER TWO
The staircase stayed
The staircase was the first thing on the list and the easiest decision. It turns five times between the canal floor and the attic, and it is the reason there are seventeen rooms and not twenty-two. A lift was needed, so the lift went into the old light well behind it, where no one had looked in two hundred years. The treads kept their wear. We had them cleaned, not levelled.
CHAPTER THREE
What is new is behind
The shutters still close. The plaster ceilings were repaired by hand, a few square metres a week. The first-floor boards still run crooked, because the house settled long ago and the floor settled with it. Everything a hotel needs — water, heat, quiet, light that dims — was threaded in behind the old surfaces. If the restoration worked, you will not notice any of it. That was the brief.
The House
2 min read
What the restoration left alone
Three years, and most of them spent deciding what not to touch.
NEXT IN THE JOURNAL
A morning at the fish market
Marée’s menu is written at half past five, standing on a wet floor.