Welcome to ‘our estate’, says mayor John Jorritsma at the Hut van Oom Ton, a hunting lodge near a large pond full of ducks on the 142 hectare De Wielewaal estate in Eindhoven. Together with the aldermen, he will speak with pride to the press on Wednesday about the intended purchase of the former domain of ‘Mr.’ Frits Philips for 29 million euros. He hopes that the city council ‘will give it a blow’ this month.
Eindhoven wants to open up the estate as a city park in the long run, where residents of Eindhoven can walk and recreate. ‘It is three times the size of the Vondelpark in Amsterdam’, Jorritsma underlines. “And about the same size as London’s Hyde Park.”
It is a special purchase for the city that has been made great by the Philips group. The area was purchased by Anton Philips at the beginning of the last century, but it was his son Frits who had the country house built on De Wielewaal in 1934. Mister Frits, nicknamed Mister Eindhoven, continued to live there until his death, at the age of 100, in 2005.
The Philips family sold the estate in 2007 to the Oisterwijk textile trader Marc Brouwers, who Quote 500– became a millionaire selling socks, tights, tights and lingerie. He had Mr Frits’ old villa thoroughly renovated and enlarged, including a 400 square meter wine cellar in which a 1949 Bentley is also parked.
Giraffes and zebras
After almost ten years, however, the ‘sock farmer’ wanted to return to his family in Oisterwijk. The Eindhoven estate was already put up for sale in 2016, for a price that, according to the broker, should be well above 30 million euros.
‘More than twenty serious buyers, mainly international buyers, have since come forward,’ says 58-year-old Brouwers at the hunting lodge overlooking the pond. From Middle Eastern oil sheiks and Eastern European oligarchs to Bruce Springsteen and Bill Gates, his broker Kenneth Alting confirms. It never came to a deal or not at all.
Then there was uncertainty about the financing or the origin of the amount of money offered. Or a potential buyer wanted to know if he could also keep giraffes and zebras on the estate. There were horse lovers with big plans and a millionaire who wanted to cut down trees to keep falcons.
A year ago, Eindhoven came into the picture as a potential buyer. In fact, the municipality has always ‘danced around the estate’, says Mayor Jorritsma. That was already the case at the end of the last century, when Mr. Frits was still alive and was looking for financing options for the maintenance of the wooded domain along the Eindhoven ring road, right next to the training complex De Herdgang of football club PSV. But for years the municipal budget left no room for this.
Even in recent months, there was another hijacker on the coast, with vague connections to the emir of Dubai and willing to pay much more than 29 million euros. But Brouwers didn’t trust it and decided to work with the municipality anyway. ‘It’s also the gun factor,’ he says. ‘Nature must remain intact. The estate is a special heritage that belongs to Eindhoven. I think it’s great that people from Eindhoven will soon be able to walk around here.’
According to his broker, De Wielewaal is still ‘the most expensive house in the Benelux’. It has been agreed in the provisional purchase agreement that Brouwers will continue to live on the estate for another three years. ‘On June 3, 2025 I will be 62 and I want to throw another party here. Then I clean the house and leave,’ says Brouwers. In the meantime, he has his old house in Oisterwijk renovated.
In the coming years, the municipality wants to make plans together with partners such as Natuurmonumenten, Brabants Landschap, VDL Groep and PSV for the phased opening and exploitation of the city park. Landscape architect Adriaan Geuze has been asked to contribute ideas on this. The municipality challenges everyone to come up with ‘suitable creative revenue models’ for the management, maintenance and security of the estate.
For example, what will happen to the enormous villa of almost 2,600 square meters of floor space? Perhaps a super-deluxe hotel, where wealthy ASML customers can spend the night, the broker suggests. What about the hunting lodge? Perhaps a catering destination, near the large pond where Eindhoven residents can ice skate in winter.
Project developer
Earlier there was a controversial plan by a project developer to build 750 homes there. ‘750 homes on De Wielewaal? Never never not’, GroenLinks alderman Rik Thijs emphasizes. It must become a public park, with ancient trees, part of the ‘green lung’. He thinks this is a great opportunity: ‘There is no city that can just buy the Vondelpark three times.’
He refers to Strijp S, the old factory site of Philips that has been transformed from a ‘forbidden city’ into a hip residential and work area. ‘We have now also bought the forbidden garden, which we are going to open to the people of Eindhoven,’ says Thijs.
His fellow alderman Monique List (VVD): ‘Isn’t it wonderful that the elderly will soon be able to say to their children or grandchildren: this is the park where old Mr Philips lived?’
In an earlier version, the name of the hunting lodge on the estate was listed as Uncle Tom’s Cabin; is correct: Uncle Ton’s Hut.