The Sonnevelds consciously opted for modernist furnishings in their new home. For this reason it was obvious that they would select their vases from the range of Glasfabriek Leerdam, which created products according to modernist principles: the quality of materials, technical execution and function were paramount and dictated the form.At the end of the 1920s Leerdam’s head designer Andries Copier produced vases based on pure, geometric forms: the sphere, the cylinder and the cube. In

The Sonnevelds owned two sculptures by John Rädecker (1885-1956). This artist, best known for his work on the National Monument in the Dam Square in Amsterdam, was one of the leading sculptors in the Netherlands in the interwar years. The Sonneveld family owned a sculpture of a lion from 1925 and a mask from 1924, which, according to the family, is a portrait study of the eldest daughter Puck. The lion stood on a pedestal designed specially by Brinkman & Van der Vlugt next to the piano in

Various photographs taken shortly after the completion of the house show the interior enlivened with numerous vases filled with flowers. Almost without exception these vases came from Glasfabriek Leerdam. In the mid-1930s the company advertised that it had a special vase for every flower.On Mrs Sonneveld’s desk there was originally a tall oval vase by Andries Copier, the head designer at Leerdam. However, to establish a connection with the damask tablecloth in the dining room and to show

The square flowerpots by Andries Copier date from the same period as his spherical vase. They are made from graniver, also known as ‘sand glass’ because of its granular structure, a form of pressed glass patented by Glasfabriek Leerdam in 1921. It was strong, inexpensive and easy to colour, making it ideal for tiles and flowerpots.Copier’s first flowerpots, designed in 1927 and intended mainly for the then-fashionable cacti and succulents, were circular with rectangular feet,

A small portrait of a woman hangs against the side of the bookcase next to Mr Sonneveld’s desk. It is not certain who the painter was. The Sonnevelds’ heirs think it might be by Jozef Israëls (1824-1911), one of the leading painters of the Hague School, but this assumption has not yet been confirmed. Following Mrs Sonneveld’s death in 1972 all the paintings in her estate were auctioned. Only this portrait was bequeathed to her grandson Leonard Kooy, who has given it on long

All the furniture in the library of Sonneveld House is by Gispen, including these chairs with orange-red peau de peche upholstery. There are two chairs with a higher backrest for men and two with a lower backrest for women, so that their hair or hats would not be flattened. Sonneveld House functioned as an exemplary showcase for modern ideas about living. The family’s choice for hypermodern architecture and an interior with tubular-steel furniture was highly unusual in the early 1930s

In the summer of 1927 the Landesgewerbemuseum in Stuttgart held an exhibition of Andries Copier’s work for Glasfabriek Leerdam. Copier installed the exhibition himself. During his trip to Stuttgart he attended the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition Die Wohnung (The Home) in the Weissenhof Estate with prototype houses by leading modernist architects including Peter Behrens, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Rotterdam-based architects J.J.P. Oud and Mart Stam. The

The typewriter on the desk belonged to Albertus Sonneveld. It is a portable model by the American company Remington. Next to the desk is the wooden case, which attaches to the baseplate. Mr Sonneveld took the typewriter with him on his business trips for Van Nelle.The first typewriter put into production was invented in 1867 by Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule. Their patent was sold to E. Remington and Sons, which originally made sewing machines and weapons.

When Gesine Sonneveld-Bos moved to this house in 1933 she was 47 years old, she had two daughters and, thanks to her husband’s successful career, she had climbed high up the social ladder. She spent her days raising her children, managing the household and reading. She also received guests, such as a friend who regularly came for afternoon tea. In the living room there was always a tea trolley at the ready for such visits.The trolley was designed by W.H. Gispen. However, a drawing of the

The service on the tea trolley did not belong to the family, but was added later. It is an example of a partnership between art and industry. In the 1930s nearly all Dutch potteries enlisted the talents of designers, whether external or in-house. This service is a variant of the ‘Strand’ service designed exclusively for Hema by Edmond Bellefroid (1893-1971) around 1933. Named after Hema’s buyer Mr Stranders, the service was a huge commercial success.Edmond Bellefroid was head

The Sonneveld family took advice on the furnishing of the house from W.H. Gispen (1890-1981). The majority of the furniture in the house was designed and manufactured by Gispen’s company, but not everything. In the early 1930s Gispen’s range was small and mainly focussed on office furniture; he did not introduce garden furniture until 1933. Photographs from the 1930s show several tubular steel and rattan chairs on the terrace. They were probably designed by the German designer

The tubular-steel cantilever chair without back legs has an illustrious history. Various designers have claimed authorship of this iconic dining chair. It even earned Willem Hendrik Gispen (1890-1981) an accusation of plagiarism.The Gispen 101 Chairs around the Sonnevelds’ dining table are remarkably similar to the Side Chair from 1927 by Mart Stam (1899-1986), which in turn resembles a version by Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) and/or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). According to legend,

Sonneveld House now contains various examples of Dutch design from the 1920s and 1930s that were not originally in the house. These objects, in particular glass items, have been added because they fit with the style of the house and the family’s taste. This chartreuse, pressed-glass service is one of the first examples of modernist industrial design in the Netherlands.This service was originally designed for Glasfabriek Leerdam by architect H.P. Berlage (1856-1934). In 1924 it was adapted

Nearly all the glass in Sonneveld House came from Leerdam. The family probably bought the items at Jungerhans, an expensive and highly respected shop on the Coolsingel that specialised in household goods, cooking utensils, tableware, ceramics and glass. Its vast stock included the latest designs by Dutch and foreign manufacturers but also more traditional products. It is also possible that the family purchased its glassware from Metz & Co., which also stocked Leerdam glass. Leerdam

The Sonneveld family’s glass service dates from 1917. It is one of the first that architect K.P.C. de Bazel (1869-1923) designed for Glasfabriek Leerdam. The factory’s director, P.M. Cochius, was dissatisfied with the pressed glass the company was producing at the time and asked de Bazel to produce a good, modern design. Before he finally succeeded in producing a truly modern pressed glass service in 1920, de Bazel designed no fewer than eight glass services, each simply named after

The table in the dining room is covered with the Fishes tablecloth, a design by Chris Lebeau (1878-1945) for Linnenfabrieken E.J.F. van Dissel & Zonen. Between 1904 and 1939 Lebeau made more than fifty designs for linen damask, more than any other Dutch designer. Uniquely, he made separate designs for the tablecloth, placemat and napkin by producing different combinations of the basic decorative motif for each piece. Many of his motifs are borrowed from nature. During the thirty years that

The chairs in the studio were chosen from a Gispen catalogue. Like the majority of the furniture and lamps in the house, they were mass-produced and delivered to the door. The family made a selection from Gispen catalogue no. 52, issued in 1933. The range of basic items of furniture in the catalogue was still relatively limited. The interior drawings show these ‘old models’ but the family eventually selected items from the new catalogue, no. 52, which came out in 1934.The Gispen

The golden-yellow vase on the table in Mr and Mrs Sonneveld’s bedroom is small but very special. In 2005 Lennard Booy devoted an episode of the Avro programme Kunstpanorama to this vase, which was available only in 1933 and 1934. It was designed by Andries Copier for Leerdam in 1932, shortly before the completion of Sonneveld House. In stylistic terms, it forms a transition between the geometric vases from the period 1928-1930, such as the spherical, cube-shaped, bell-jar-shaped and

From the mid-1920s Andries Copier, head designer at Glasfabriek Leerdam, strove to design a simple, functional carafe and glasses. He succeeded in 1929 with the Wijnbes liqueur set, produced in the newly developed violet-grey glass.  The glasses are spherical on a short foot. The spherical vase has a circular flat foot and facetted stopper. Copier later designed additional Wijnbes glasses, but never developed an entire service. The simple, geometric form of the components served as the

When they were not entertaining, the Sonneveld family used a relatively simple dining service, of which only a few plates and bowls have survived. They are made from cream-coloured porcelain with minimal decoration consisting of two lines at the rim: a thin black line and a slightly wider silver line. Apart from the material and the silver edge, which gives the service a chic appearance, the design is simple and restrained.The service was made by Pirkenhammer, a now-defunct factory in Bohemia

Metal design underwent its most rapid development in the 1920s and 1930s. The metal with the greatest effect on the design and manufacture of products was aluminium. Aluminium, extracted from bauxite, became available at a commercial scale mainly after the Second World War because of the availability of cheap electricity. Aluminium was the solution that industry had been looking for since the nineteenth century: a new metal that combined the strength of iron with the conductibility of copper.

In Puck’s bedroom there is a spherical, amber-coloured vase filled with cornflowers. The ‘Tomato’ was designed in 1929 by Willem Rozendaal (1899-1971) for Kristalunie in Maastricht. It is unlikely that the Sonneveld family owned such a vase, but it is also not unthinkable. Almost all the glass items in Sonneveld House came from Glasfrabriek Leerdam, a company that employed architects and artists to design its products. Encouraged by Leerdam’s success, in 1927 Kristalunie

Gispen supplied no fewer than twenty-two different lamps for Sonneveld House, selected from the Giso lamp catalogue no. 29 (1929): lamps with elementary forms such as cones, cylinders and spheres. In 1926 Gispen introduced an entirely new form of lighting in the Netherlands with the Giso range of lamps. The Giso lamps were made from crystal glass covered with a thin layer of opal glass. The ‘Giso glass’ allowed more (and whiter) light to penetrate than the conventional milk

Above the sofa in the living room hangs a seascape with two botters, a kind of fishing boat, by Willem Bastiaan Tholen (1860-1931). It is a fairly traditional work, certainly compared with the interior in which it hangs. In addition to this painting, the Sonneveld family also owned a river scene by the Rotterdam-born painter Gerard Altmann (1877-1940) and a landscape with windmills by Johannes Karel Leurs (1865-1938). All these paintings are stylistically related to the Hague School, a late

Gispen supplied the majority of the furniture for Sonneveld House. However, the sketches of the interior from October 1932 show numerous items by the German-Austrian furniture manufacturer Thonet. The majority were replaced in 1933 by Gispen models, but this small desk for Mrs Sonneveld is indeed by Thonet. According to Brinkman & Van der Vlugt’s expense accounts, it was ordered directly from Thonet.The desk was designed by the architect Bruno Weil, artistic director of the Paris

The carpet which lay in the family’s livingroom was bought at Metz & Co, a store in Amsterdam specialising in modern furniture, fabrics, applied art products, women’s fashion and hats. This carpet, serial number S118, was highly popular at the time and remained in demand until well into the 1950s. It was probably designed by Elise Djo Bourgeois, who also designed the kitchen curtains at Sonneveld House.North African products were a major influence on applied art in this period.