Villa Boissevain

offices Tesselschadestraat 4-12 Amsterdam

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When we visited Tesselschadestraat 4-12 the first time, we noticed so many extraordinary details that we dived straight into the historic archives. The left part of the complex happened to be designed around 1876 by Dutch architect Pierre Cuypers and was named Villa Boissevain, after its first inhabitants, the bankers family Boissevain. The villa went through heavy modernisations, the biggest in the fifties when the bank Labouchere expanded towards the four adjacent 19th century city houses and built a modern entrance building on the spot of the original pastoral wooden entrance gallery.
Swedish owned investment company T. Ljungberg BV aims to renovate Tesselschadestraat 4-12 and reach label BREEAM Excellent in-use. Architect Hans Verhoeven and me are assigned for the exterior and interior design, to which we convinced the client to add a profound restauration of the left over historic elements (such as the hidden brickwork mosaics above the windows) and to replace the entire entrance building from the fifties by a more inviting and transparent façade of laminated oak wood window frames. Therefore we used design principles that we derived from Cuypers’ work, such as the contrast between brickwork buildings and its wooden extensions, the indirect access, rectangle window frames being endlessly divided into sub-rectangles, and the use of pure materials.
 

Location: Tesselschadestraat 4-12 in Amsterdam | Program: renovation and restauration of exterior and interior of an office building | Client: Prima Project BV, subsidiary of T. Ljungberg BV | Architects: Menno Trautwein in collaboration with architect Hans Verhoeven | Project management: CBRE | Historical photo: ing. J. Van Dijk | Period: 2022-current | Phase: building permit received, tender finalised, start of execution expected in 2024