‘Living machine’ with the comfort of a luxury passenger ship

Gé, the youngest of the two daughters of the Sonneveld family, remembered the move in 1933. On the day of the move, the then twelve-year-old Gé was still having breakfast in the old, familiar, late 19th-century mansion with stepped gables on the stately Heemraadssingel in Rotterdam, says the audio tour of Huis Sonneveld, which became a museum house in 2001 after a thorough restoration. After school, Gé had to go to the new house that her father Bertus Sonneveld, one of the three directors of the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam, had built near the Museumpark. Here Gé entered a completely new world where living was dominated by the New Objectivity.

The new house was – and is – a beautiful ‘cubic’ white house in the Nieuwe Bouwen style, a minimalist architectural style that originated in the 1920s. The furniture was also completely new. As if they wanted to start a new life in their new home, the Sonnevelders had left behind all their old household goods. They had taken only their clothes, books and a few precious objects.

Load-bearing steel skeleton

Everything, from the crockery to the cabinets and from the cutlery to the lamps, was new and business-like in Sonneveld House. Sitting, sleeping, eating, reading and so on, the six residents of Huis Sonneveld did on, in or on tubular steel furniture. Only in the large kitchen on the first floor, the domain of the two live-in maids, were – and are – two classic wooden kitchen chairs.

Huis Sonneveld is still called a ‘living machine’. The influence of the Franco-Swiss Le Corbusier, who in 1923 had defined the modern home as ‘a machine a habiter, is therefore undeniable. Four of the’cinq points d’architecture modern‘ who formulated the ultimate architect of the 20th century in 1926, knows the house designed by the architectural firm Brinkman & Van der Vlugt. For example, the load-bearing steel skeleton of the house makes the ‘freely divisible floor plans’ (1) possible, and the first floor, with the exception of the kitchen, consists of one large, open space with spacious dining, sitting and working corners with comfortable Gispen steel tubular furniture. Thanks to the steel frame, Sonneveld House also has ‘freely dividable facades’ (2) and a spectacular horizontal ‘band window’ (3) of sixteen meters long on the first floor. In addition, the house has a ‘roof garden’ (4), behind which a large flexible windscreen made of steel and glass can be used to sunbathe.

Only the ‘pilotis’ (5), as Le Corbusier called the concrete columns on which many of his buildings rest, are missing, although there are a few steel columns covered with black, shiny plates on the ground floor. Just like the white villas that Le Corbusier built in and around Paris almost a century ago, the Sonneveld House also has a floating character, because a two-storey box cantilevers over the building part on the ground floor.

Le Corbusier’s living machines are among the most influential buildings of the twentieth century but, in terms of living, have an extremely bad reputation. The French couple Savoye found the villa named after them that Le Corbusier had built near Paris ‘uninhabitable’. Even Le Corbusier’s wife, Yvonne Gallis, called the new Paris apartment the couple had moved into in 1934, designed by her husband, “a hospital” and “an dissection room.” She was mortally unhappy. Condemned to a life of housewife in a spartan living machine in a dull suburb, Gallis got pastis and became an alcoholic wreck who died prematurely.

Hygiene, comfort and luxury

Fortunately for the Sonnevelders, the head of the family was not a fan of Le Corbusier’s purist Nieuwe Bouwen. For him, the New Building, which a century ago was not coincidentally also called New Objectivity, was the style of businessmen and industrialists like himself for whom efficiency was the highest form of purity. Bertus Sonneveld wanted a modern house that fit the machine age and was as efficient and comfortable as the cabins of the luxury passenger ships he knew from his travels to the United States.

In short, he wanted a luxurious and comfortable living machine. He received it from Leendert van der Vlugt, who had previously designed the famous Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam and had also provided the two other Van Nelle directors with luxury living machines.

Not so much ‘light, air and space’, the famous trio of the Nieuwe Bouwen, reign in Sonneveld House, as ‘hygiene, comfort and luxury’, as architect Joris Molenaar notes in the film about the restoration of Sonneveld House, which is shown in the former garage. The house has no less than three bathrooms with an area of ​​345 square meters, one of which has a massage shower with ten shower heads that Bertus Sonneveld had used on one of his business trips in an American hotel. Also, the house is equipped with a house phone in every room and a central radio and sound system with speakers throughout the house.

Even the colors in the interior of the house with its all-white exterior were lavish, according to research before restoration began. Gé got a yellow bedroom on the second floor, her older sister Puck a blue one. Their joint studio on the ground floor, where they could do their homework and receive friends, is yellow and blue. Their parents’ bedroom, also on the second floor, is painted in different shades of brown and beige, the adjoining dressing area is a crackling green. The maids’ rooms on the ground floor are mainly red. Surprisingly enough, the interior of the puristic white Huis Sonneveld, for example, is more dominated by ‘more is better’ than by the efficient ‘less is more’.