Sonneveld HouseSonneveld House

For Mrs Sonneveld modern living was a status symbol. She had a highly developed sense of luxury: when in public she usually wore jewellery, a long coat preferably with a fur collar, and a hat with a hatpin.

The Sonneveld family comprised Albertus Sonneveld, one of the directors of the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam, his wife Gésine Sonneveld-Bos and their daughters Puck and Gé. They lived in Sonneveld House from 1933 to 1955.

On the sofa, by the open hearth and on Mrs Sonneveld’s desk are various magazines and a copy of the Algemeen Handelsblad from 1933. We know that the Sonneveld family bought various Dutch and foreign magazines, which were devoured by Mrs Sonneveld and her daughters.

The studio was designed for the Sonnevelds’ two daughters. The sisters used the studio for reading, listening to music and entertaining their friends.

Albertus Sonneveld was a self-made man. He worked his way up in the Van Nelle Factory from clerk to director of the tobacco division. He began his fifty-year career at Van Nelle in 1900 at the age of fourteen.

From the summer of 1935 Puck spent almost a year in America, where she stayed with two of her father’s business associates: the Kennedy and Miller families in Paducah, Kentucky. Kennedy supplied uncut tobacco to the Van Nelle Factory.

The garage at Sonneveld House has room for two cars. The family drove expensive American cars: Mr Sonneveld initially had a Plymouth and later a Chevrolet and Mrs Sonneveld had a Packard convertible.

The Sonneveld family could listen to the radio throughout the house. The sound system, built into the sofa in the studio, was connected to other rooms in the house, each of which had a speaker, enabling the family to listen to the music selected in the studio all over the house.

In the bookcase above Gé’s bed is a copy of Pommie (1934), written and illustrated by Rie Cramer. We do not know for certain whether Gé, the Sonnevelds’ younger daughter, who was thirteen when the house was completed, actually read this book but it is certainly not inconceivable.

Nieuwe Instituut is built on what was once the so-called ‘Land van Hoboken’, a 56-hectare estate of mostly grassland: a green oasis in the middle of the city. The Sonnevelds had their new house built on the edge of this estate on a piece of land earmarked for a villa park.

The typewriter on the desk belonged to Albertus Sonneveld. It is a portable model by the American company Remington. Next to the desk is the wooden case, which attaches to the baseplate. Mr Sonneveld took the typewriter with him on his business trips for Van Nelle.

During her husband’s lengthy business trips, Mrs Sonneveld took charge of the housekeeping and the management of the family’s two maids. Jeanne Schreuder was nineteen when she began working for the family in 1931. Her older colleague Josephine Müller, known as ‘Finie’, came from Germany.