A Holland house of the new school of architecture which aims at 
simplification of form and material 
Many of the new homes at Laren are influenced by the peasant 
cottages and show sweeping thatched roofs 
What the Dutch Can Tell Us About House Planning 
SUGGESTIVE SCHEMES FROM HOLLAND HOMES—HOW ROOMS ARE ARRANGED — 
EXCELLENT PLANNING IN BRICK WORK AND WOOD FINISHING—THE DUTCH KITCHEN 
by Antoinette Rehmann Perrett 
Photographs by the Author 
T HE modern homes of England and Germany that represent 
the progress of domestic architecture and the domestica¬ 
tion of art during the past years are well known in America, 
but very little is heard of the new Holland homes. Yet they, too, 
offer fresh inspiration and good suggestive schemes for our home 
building and furnishing. In their own characteristic and indi¬ 
vidual ways, the new houses in Holland express many of the ten¬ 
dencies that mark our home 
building, such as the simpli¬ 
fication of form and material 
in the construction of the 
house, a revision and rever¬ 
sion from conventional plan¬ 
ning and the combining of 
beauty and usefulness in the 
essential furnishings of the 
household. The Dutch have 
a great tradition in domestic 
art—of which we, too, be¬ 
came Colonial heirs through 
the Knickerbocker history of 
New York—and through 
their world-wide seafaring 
and their colonization of the 
East Indies, they have been 
quickened by the art of the 
Orient and have become a 
nation of collectors of beau¬ 
tiful things. In these new 
homes there is a new feeling 
for the worth of the old 
houses and of the furnish¬ 
ings of earlier times, but there is also a profound interest, a fervor 
for solving the new problems in new ways. 
A suburban settlement in which all these tendencies of Holland 
homes find a beautiful expression is at Laren, a peasant village 
on the heath south of the Zuider Zee, that has become famous as 
an artist’s colony through the works of such men as Anton Mauve, 
Iveever, Nuihuis, Tony Offermans and the German artist, Max 
Liebermann, and which has lately come within commuting dis¬ 
tance of Amsterdam. The new homes have been largely in¬ 
fluenced by the romantic spirit and beauty of the Laren peasant 
cottages, by the interesting sweep and deep eaves of their thatched 
roofs, as well as by the beauty of their setting, by their door yard 
gardens, their hedges of 
holly and hawthorn, their 
picturesque elms or sentinel 
poplars, and by the very 
character of Laren lanes, 
which have absolutely re¬ 
fused the straightness that is 
so characteristic of the vil¬ 
lage streets of the canal- 
locked lowlands and which 
revel in curved lines that 
help tremendously in the 
charm of the place. In many 
ways the Laren cottages re¬ 
mind us more of English 
cottage building than of the 
prim fronts of the Dutch 
villages of the lowlands, a 
resemblance which takes us 
way back to the time of the 
Saxon migration, when 
Laren was the last camp 
that the Saxons made before 
setting sail for England. 
The new artistic homes 
about Laren are built of red brick and preferably of hand-made 
brick. It is a great gain to the beauty of a community if there is 
some good traditional building material to keep to, especially if it 
has as many qualities as brick has to commend it to the love for 
esthetic simplicity as well as to the spirit for architectural ad- 
Brick is largely used in the construction of this house and the rather 
unusual window arrangement insures a bright interior 
( 87 ) 
