The jet set came to party in a Catholic castle in Haarzuilens

Whoever stands in the hall of Castle De Haar in Haarzuilens imagines himself in a Catholic, neo-Gothic church rather than in the largest castle in the Netherlands. Pointed arches everywhere in the eighteen meter high hall, one of the four walls even consists of richly decorated pointed arches stacked on top of each other. In the many niches in the pilasters between the arches are statues of men and women who could very well pass for saints. High in the semi-circular, apparently wooden barrel vault are multi-coloured stained-glass windows. Only a missing altar and the chairs, benches and other furniture in the middle of the hall indicate that no holy masses are being celebrated.

Castle De Haar was therefore designed by the Catholic fanatic Petrus Jozephus Hubertus Cuypers (1827-1921), the most wonderful Dutch 19th-century architect. Cuypers began his unlikely career as a designer of new Catholic churches, which were built in large numbers above the major rivers after the restoration of the episcopal hierarchy in the Netherlands in 1853. It didn’t stop there. Strangely enough, Cuypers, who saw Gothic as the only correct – because Catholic – style, became the most important architect of the Protestant Netherlands. He was even allowed to build the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the national building par excellence, of which he made an ‘episcopal palace’, according to critics.

Equally astonishing is that Cuypers is still known as the father – or rather, grandfather – of modern architecture. French architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc. Via HP Berlage, architect of the castle-like Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, this dogma, which was regarded as ‘rational’, ended up with an even younger generation of architects a century ago. They eventually invented the ‘functionalist’ Nieuwe Bouwen, which is the story of the genesis of modern architecture in the Netherlands, which has been repeated over and over again.

Unlimited budget

In 1891 Cuypers received his second dream assignment: the restoration of De Haar Castle. A year earlier, Baron Étienne van Zuylen van Nijevelt, who lives in Paris, had inherited the ruined medieval castle. Van Zuylen wanted to restore it to its former glory, but with all the conveniences of modern times, such as electricity, central heating, a kitchen with a six-metre stove, and so on. The construction budget was virtually unlimited because Van Zuylen had been married since 1887 to the extremely wealthy Hélène de Rothschild, a member of the well-known banking family.

Cuypers also followed Viollet-le-Duc in restorations. For Cuypers, restoration was not repair or bringing a ruin back to its original state, but “bringing a building to a complete state that may never have existed,” as the French neo-Gothic once put it. It took twenty years to restore Cuyper’s ideal medieval castle, and during construction the plans became increasingly extensive. For the construction of the immense park around the castle, which includes a ‘Roman’ and an English garden, the village of Haarzuilens was demolished and rebuilt in a new form a few kilometers away. Cuypers and his son Jos also built a new gatehouse and a chateleta small castle for, among other things, generators and other machines that were necessary for the desired living comfort.

The Van Zuylens did not live permanently at De Haar. The castle was one of their country residences, where they only feasted and dined in August and September. In the 1960s, De Haar became the meeting point of the international jet set, with guests such as Brigitte Bardot, Yves Saint Laurent, Gina Lollobrigida and, as the odd one out, the philosopher Michel Foucault. In 2000, when an eleven-year restoration of the castle began, the Van Zuylen family handed over the castle to Stichting Kasteel De Haar, but retained the right to spend the late summer there.

Resistance to melancholy

After the restoration, which this time consisted of repair, the castle and gardens are now almost eerily perfect. For a moment, the austere exterior of the brick castle makes you think that Cuypers has more or less adhered to his dogma that architecture should be stripped of all superfluousness. Only here and there a gargoyle protrudes from the walls. But in the interior, Cuypers has surrendered unreservedly to the decorative urge that is characteristic of all neo-Gothic architects. It starts in the church hall. Here, not only do the decorated pointed arches form unconstructive screens, but the barrel vault of cast iron and concrete is also hidden behind oak planks.

All rooms around the hall are lavishly decorated. The dark dining room has a fireplace in the form of an enormous neo-Gothic altarpiece, which is superfluous due to the central heating, with Adam and Eve at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle. Visitors were also reminded of original sin in the ballroom. There are large Flemish tapestries from the 16th century, which depict, among other things, the expulsion of the primeval mother and father from paradise.

On the first floor, Cuypers’ grip on design slackened. Here, only two of the nine enormous (bed)rooms are fully furnished according to Cuyper’s design. In Van Zuylen-Rothschild’s remarkably light bedroom there is not even a trace of neo-Gothic architecture. To the fury of Cuypers, the baroness did not want to spend the nights in his melancholy Gesamtkunstwerk. She commissioned the French designer Henri Nelson to design a white and pink room in the Louis XVI style. Cuypers found her room so detonating that he had a heavy oak door placed in front of the Louis XVI door. Like so many in De Haar, it was certainly not indicated by the construction.