The life of Strandweg Residence – 22,000 guilders, beautiful view

An autopsy is what Zandvoort photographer Simone Peerdeman (1976) calls her project Strandweg Residence, about the demise of a block with sixteen porch houses on the former Strandweg in Zandvoort. For days, Peerdeman took photos of the 1952 Residence on Fauvageplein. First she photographed the interiors and remaining household furnishings of the abandoned, moribund Residence. Then, in June this year, she recorded how the housing block turned into a pile of rubble and finally disappeared from the face of the earth.

In the years before 2023, the Residentie Strandweg in Zandvoort was known as the Badhuisplein demolition flat. The municipality had already bought the flat in 2009 in connection with plans for new construction around Badhuisplein, the heart of Zandvoort. But it was only in 2021 that the temporary tenants were told that they really had to leave soon.

After the last residents left at the beginning of this year, Peerdeman started taking photographs. She received permission from the municipality to also record the inside of the houses. “It was a joy to look for traces left behind by the residents,” she says. “I was just in time. The demolition workers already arrived with the veneer panels to board up the windows. I have just seen and photographed the beautiful view of the sea that the residents had. I photographed all kinds of details, such as a stained glass window of a fisherman’s wife and two small children on the beach, and a ceramic door handle with flowers. The most beautiful were the original Bruynzeel kitchens that were located in three homes.”

Atlantic Wall

The life of Residentie Strandweg lasted just over seventy years. The flat was completed in the summer of 1952 as one of the first buildings in the reconstruction of Zandvoort. During the Second World War, the German occupiers demolished a large part of Zandvoort to make way for the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, the 5,000 kilometer long defense line of the Third Reich that ran from Northern Norway to Spain. Almost all striking Zandvoort buildings, such as the Groot Badhuis, the Kurhaus and the 19th-century passage, were demolished in the years 1942-45.

After the war, the city council decided to rebuild Zandvoort as a modern seaside resort aimed at mass tourism. As early as 1952, Hotel Bouwes stood at Badhuisplein, a large, genuine modernist building, designed by ex-De Stijll member Jan Wils. Due to demolition, the hotel’s life ended in 1987, 35 years shorter than that of Residentie Strandweg.

The Strandweg residence was certainly not intended for the masses. Peerdeman found a photo from 1951 of the information board at the apartment building, on which the houses are announced as ‘modern flats located on the boulevard with beautiful sea views, with garages, centrally located. heating, hot water facilities, Bruynzeel kitchens, refrigerators, built-in sunshades’. The price of the house, 22,000 guilders of which 13,000 guilders had to be his own money, was much too high for Jan Modaal.

The fact that the houses were luxury flats seventy years ago can still be seen in Peerdeman’s photos. On the Strandweg side, the facade of the block had the shape of a sawtooth, for a better view of the sea from the houses, each with two panoramic windows. The interior photos show spacious, bright houses with living rooms that also had chimneys despite the central heating.

Rasta flag

Once demolition started after the lengthy asbestos removal, Residentie Strandweg was finished in a month. “At one point the apartment building looked like a letterbox,” says Peerdeman. “Those strange empty spaces between crumbling walls were intriguing. They raised the question of when a house becomes a home. Then I also took pictures of interior walls with different colors and wallpaper. In the storage room on the ground floor, a wall had emerged with the colors of the Rasta flag, green-yellow-red. It was one of the many traces that set the imagination in motion. Who painted that flag? A fan of Bob Marley? And why in the storage room? Did a reggae fan live there?”

The latest photos of Residentie Strandweg show an empty space on which there are two buildings, one yellow and one blue. “The area now serves as a bicycle shed. The Strandweg Residence was certainly not the ugliest building in Zandvoort. On the contrary, the sawtooth facade and the small, hexagonal windows on the ground floor gave the flat its own character. I consider the photos to be a tribute to the architecture of the reconstruction period. This is handled so carelessly. The Strandweg residence has been demolished and already seems forgotten in Zandvoort.”