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Villa Annie
1902 / G. Kloppers

Burgemeester Schooklaan 20

The foreman from the labor movement Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis (1846-1919) chose Hilversum as his residence because of his wife’s failing health, the opportunities to play for his son and his ties to the Hilversum printing company Nonhebel. There the anarchist magazine De Vrije Socialist was printed.

F. Netscher described in the Hollandse Revue in 1903 the neighborhood where Domela Nieuwenhuis had taken up residence… Rows of houses built together are not found there; everything is kept in the villa style. Architects who build ‘modern’ test their strengths in houses with bay windows, arched windows, whitewashed walls and roofs with red tiles that protrude beyond the facade. And carry white chimneys: -a stew of the Dutch villa, the English cottage and the Swiss Alpine house. All those white building knobs are separated from each other by iron gates with narrow entrances or wooden gallows arches. And it’s called fresh, and cheerful, and sweet. – On one of these roads, through a building site in operation, the so-called Schooklaan, between villas under construction, on a crunching gravel road, bare, not yet planted, with a large piece of outside sky above it, there is a cheerful, coquettish, clean villa house with a large arched window-door in the front, and plenty of light and air all around. Domela Nieuwenhuis lives there.

What a contradiction, Netscher thought, that this man lives in a villa area, which is ruled by capitalism and rich people. The villa was named Annie after the first child of Domela Nieuwenhuis and Johanna Egberta Godthelp, who died in 1899. Domela does not seem to have spent much time in Hilversum. The villa was rented out during the summer months. Domela died there in 1919. The villa was sold in 1921.

Source: Annette Koenders, Hilversum. Architectuur en Stedenbouw 1850-1940, Zwolle (2001).