Rietveld Schröder House

The Rietveld Schröder House, completed in 1924 at the end of an ordinary brick terrace in Utrecht, is the purest built expression of De Stijl, the Dutch movement of primary colours and straight lines best known through the paintings of Piet Mondrian. It was designed by the furniture maker turned architect Gerrit Rietveld, but the client, Truus Schröder-Schräder, a young widow with three children, shaped it as much as he did. She wanted a house with as few walls as possible, open to the outside and free of the stiff conventions of middle-class domestic life, and the two worked on it side by side.

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. Rietveld originally wanted concrete, but on such a small house it proved too expensive: only the foundations and balconies are concrete, and the rest is brick, plaster, steel and wood made to look like floating panels.

Upstairs is the real invention. To satisfy building regulations the first floor was labelled an attic, but in fact it is a single open living level that can be divided into separate bedrooms by a system of sliding and folding panels. Close them and there are three bedrooms and a living room; open them and the whole floor becomes one space. The ground floor is more conventional, arranged around a central stair. Schröder lived here until her death in 1985, after which the house was restored and opened as a museum.

It is now run by the Centraal Museum, and it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Visits are intimate by necessity: small groups move through a house of modest size, and the experience of watching the panels slide into new configurations is what stays with most people. The Centraal Museum in the city centre displays many of Rietveld's chairs.

Getting there

The house is at Prins Hendriklaan 50 on the eastern side of Utrecht, about 1.8 km from the city centre; it is roughly 15 minutes by bicycle from Utrecht Centraal station, or a 20-minute walk from the Centraal Museum. Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS) is about 36 km away, with direct trains to Utrecht Centraal.