The Most Beautiful Buildings in the Kingdom of the Netherlands
10 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful buildings in the Kingdom of the Netherlands are Van Gogh Museum, Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank House. The list covers 10 buildings. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The Netherlands built its identity on trade, art and an unusually civic culture, and its buildings show all three. The wealth of the Dutch Golden Age paid for elegant townhouses and public institutions, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the country produced architects who reshaped how buildings look, from the Gothic Revival of Pierre Cuypers to the abstract colour planes of De Stijl. Many of its finest interiors were built to display the art that made the Golden Age famous.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, designed by Cuypers and opened in 1885, holds Rembrandt's Night Watch and is famous for the public passage that runs straight through the building. The Mauritshuis in The Hague, a seventeenth-century house of Dutch classicism, hangs Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Teylers Museum in Haarlem, opened in 1784, is the oldest museum in the country, its Oval Room preserving the atmosphere of the Enlightenment.
The twentieth century added more radical forms. The Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, built in 1924, turned the ideas of De Stijl into a house of sliding walls and primary colours. The Kröller-Müller Museum, set in the woods of the Hoge Veluwe National Park, combines a major collection of Van Gogh with one of Europe's largest sculpture gardens. Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam is a cinema of 1921 blending Art Deco and the Amsterdam School, while the Zaanse Schans gathers working windmills and green wooden houses along the Zaan.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Van Gogh Museum | Museum | |
| 2 | Rijksmuseum | Museum | |
| 3 | Anne Frank House | Museum | |
| 4 | Zaanse Schans | Open-air museum | |
| 5 | Rietveld Schröder House | Museum | ✓ |
| 6 | Teylers Museum | Science museum | |
| 7 | Kröller-Müller Museum | Museum | |
| 8 | Mauritshuis | Museum | |
| 9 | Tuschinski Theatre | Theatre building | |
| 10 | Eise Eisinga Planetarium | Museum | ✓ |
01 Van Gogh Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.4 km from Amsterdam52.358° N 4.881° E
GoldenArtists · CC BY 4.0 The main building is Gerrit Rietveld's design. He died in 1964, before it was built.
02 Rijksmuseum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.2 km from Amsterdam52.360° N 4.885° E
Image by user32212 from Pixabay The route most visitors take leads up to the Gallery of Honour, which ends in the room built for Rembrandt's The Night Watch of 1642, a militia portrait of enormous size and energy. Along the way hang Vermeer's The Milkmaid, Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride and his Syndics of the Drapers' Guild, and works by Frans Hals, Jan Steen and Jacob van Ruisdael.
Did you know? Cuypers's entry came only second in the first design contest of 1863, when no submission was judged good enough; he won the second contest in 1876.
03 Anne Frank House
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 3.3 km from Amsterdam52.375° N 4.884° E
Lệ Xuân · CC BY-SA 4.0 Otto Frank had moved the offices of his spice and pectin businesses here in December 1940. His employees Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman and Victor Kugler kept the business running in the front of the building while supplying the people in hiding. After the arrest the annex was emptied on the orders of the police, but Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl went back and rescued Anne's papers.
04 Zaanse Schans
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 15.1 km from Amsterdam52.474° N 4.816° E
Image by 3345557 from Pixabay The Zaan region was one of the first industrial landscapes in Europe. From the late 16th century hundreds of wind-driven mills here sawed timber, pressed oil, ground mustard and pigments, and the villages built their houses of wood in a distinctive style: green-painted planked walls, white trim, decorated gables and neat front gardens.
Did you know? The preservation idea grew from a 1946 citizens' initiative called Zaans Schoon, which sought to rescue the region's wooden heritage.
05 Rietveld Schröder House
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.5 km from Utrecht52.085° N 5.148° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Joop Elsinga · CC0 From outside, the house looks like a composition of separate planes that happen to meet. White and grey walls, black window frames and short lines of red, yellow and blue project past one another, forming balconies and edges that never quite enclose a box. Windows are hinged to open only at right angles to the wall, so that even when open they preserve the geometry.
Did you know? Trained as a furniture maker, Rietveld drew his working plans at 1:10 and 1:25 scales instead of the 1:1 and 1:20 used by builders, and settled many details on site.
06 Teylers Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 0.7 km from Haarlem52.381° N 4.640° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Its heart is the Oval Room, designed by Leendert Viervant behind Teyler's house and opened in 1784. It is a neoclassical, top-lit room with a gallery running around it, built for experiments, lectures and the viewing of books and prints.
Did you know? Teyler's will also created two learned societies, one for theology and one for physics, poetry, history, drawing and numismatics, which still exist.
07 Kröller-Müller Museum
Kröller Müller Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 14 km from Arnhem52.096° N 5.817° E
Ziko van Dijk · CC BY-SA 4.0 That museum opened in 1938 in a low, restrained building by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, with daylight falling on the walls from above.
Did you know? Helene's very first art purchase, in 1908, was not a Van Gogh but a landscape by the Hague School painter Paul Gabriël.
08 Mauritshuis
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 3 km from The Hague52.080° N 4.314° E
Image by AJEL from Pixabay The collection is only around 850 objects, which is exactly why a visit works so well: the Dutch and Flemish painting is dense, and the famous works hang in intimate rooms rather than vast halls. Three pictures bring most visitors. Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, from around 1665; his View of Delft, one of the most admired townscapes in European art; and Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp of 1632.
Did you know? Before returning from Brazil, John Maurice shipped tropical wood to The Hague for the staircase and filled the hall with Brazilian weapons, stuffed animals and paintings.
09 Tuschinski Theatre
Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.1 km from Amsterdam52.366° N 4.894° E
User:DirkvdM · CC BY-SA 3.0 The theatre was the dream of Abraham Icek Tuschinski, a cinema owner who already ran four houses in Rotterdam, and his brothers-in-law Hermann Gerschtanowitz and Hermann Ehrlich. Building began on 18 June 1919 and cost around four million guilders. Tuschinski was determined to open with a theatre organ, the first in the Netherlands, and when the American builder could not deliver in time he travelled to Brussels to buy one from another cinema.
Did you know? Murals by Pieter den Besten were painted over in salmon pink in the 1930s and brought back to light during the centenary restoration of 2019–2020.
10 Eise Eisinga Planetarium
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 17.5 km from Leeuwarden53.187° N 5.544° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
bertknot from scarborough, australia · CC BY-SA 2.0 On the painted ceiling the Sun sits at the centre, with Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn moving around it in real time on slots cut into the boards. The Earth is a small golden ball on a wire; the Moon's phases, the date and other astronomical data are shown on separate dials.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful buildings in the Kingdom of the Netherlands?
- On our list, Van Gogh Museum ranks first, followed by Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank House.
- Where is the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring?
- Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, which also holds his View of Delft. The museum occupies a 17th-century mansion beside the Hofvijver.
- What is the oldest museum in the Netherlands?
- Teylers Museum in Haarlem, opened in 1784, is the oldest museum in the Netherlands. It was founded with the bequest of the merchant Pieter Teyler van der Hulst and combines art, science and natural history.
- What is De Stijl?
- De Stijl was a Dutch art and design movement founded in 1917, associated with Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld. It reduced form to straight lines, rectangles and primary colours, and the Rietveld Schröder House is its best-known building.
- How many buildings are on this list in the Kingdom of the Netherlands?
- The list covers 10 buildings.