Canalside Life — An Elegant Sufficiency

Our hotel is situated in between two of the main ring canals of the old city and we have enjoyed being in such a beautiful area.

We love the clever architecture that has been engineered to create a contemporary interior of twenty odd old buildings and imagine that many of the surrounding structures are similarly interesting inside (and were probably built using similarly enormous budgets)

I think that we could probably state confidently that building like this doesn’t come cheap.

But however much you spend, however grand your interior design, life has to be lived and that, as we have seen on many occasions, needs patience.

From everyone. Heaven help the person pushing a pram, or the wheelchair user when the footpath is overtaken by bicycles.

Not only bicycles actually, for we have seen some of these little cars using cycle tracks and pavements too.

When there’s a serious delivery to be made the lorries seem to make use of the bridges, though that too is not without its problems.

Are these twenty first century problems or were they always an issue for those privileged few who lived in this area? We were mulling over such things as we walked along the Keisergracht this morning.

We were heading towards the home of the Van Loon family, now a museum and a fine example of the style in which a patrician family would live in the 1900s.

The family’s sole surviving male heir died in 2006 and his daughter inherited, though her father had bequeathed the property to the city for conservation.

Many of the Van Loon forbears are there on the walls of the house and we’d liked to have learned more about them. But information was scarce and the only nuggest of information I brought away was that Thora, great great grandmother to the present Van Loon descendent was the person who determined who would attend the royal balls and presentations during that time - not someone to upset, then.

It’s the sort of house where generations look down on life as it happens, perhaps insinuating a guilty conscience, if one had anything to feel guilty about, of course!

It’s a beautiful, stately three bedroomed home, however, with lovely views of the canal through the old rippled glass in the windows.

Upstairs, in the nursery was a lovely collection of portraits of the children. I couldn’t resist taking a photograph of this sweet picture, but as I did, I noticed something about the others in the group.

They were by none other than Therese Schwartze, she of the Joffers I mentioned in my blog yesterday. As if to confirm the Van Loon’s place in nineteenth century society, they had chosen the society portrait painter of the day to capture their children for their walls. I think they made a great choice, don’t you?

The modern day portraits made an interesting contrast.

Whilst upstairs, we’d peered through the french doors across the garden. Yes, that’s all the Van Loon property, both the formal gardens and the coach house at the rear. They were well known for maintaining six carriages and however many horses would be needed for those - life here was far from shabby, I suspect.

Even though, when viewed from the coach house, the Van Loon property is rather more modest than those of the neighbours, I think that the same must have been true then as it is today.