these basic forms of beauty

Sonneveld House has a steel skeletal structure and concrete floors, enabling it to dispense with loadbearing walls, thus allowing the spaces to be divided with greater freedom. Walls were used only to separate spaces. To create optimal openness and flexibility, on this floor the architects opted to divide the spaces with sliding panels and curtains rather than fixed walls. In this way it was possible for the living room to stretch across the entire length of the house. The bands of windows running the full length of the building admitted a sea of light.

Functionalism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century and had its heyday in the interwar years. Sonneveld House, built between 1929 and 1933, is one of the best-preserved private houses in this style in the Netherlands.  Light, air and space were important qualities for Functionalist architects. They strove to create a healthy living environment with abundant fresh air and sunlight for their buildings’ residents and users. The building’s function and the needs of the residents were more important to these architects than the building’s monumentality. They designed efficient and hygienic buildings using modern techniques and materials such as steel and concrete. Functional floor plans with freely divided spaces gave the buildings an open and light appearance, which was reinforced by balconies and terraces. Their buildings contrasted greatly with traditional, closed houses and apartment blocks.

Sonneveld House is one of the best-preserved houses in the Dutch Functionalist style. The villa was designed in 1933 by architecture firm Brinkman and Van der Vlugt for Albertus Sonneveld, a director of the Van Nelle Factory. The architects designed a total concept in which architecture, interior and furnishings are perfectly coordinated and reinforce one another. Light and spacious, the house features numerous balconies and large areas of fenestration that offer views of the surrounding garden. Almost all items of furniture and lamps in the house were made by the firm of Gispen, some of them specially for the Sonnevelds. This customization reveals the family’s appreciation of luxury and comfort. Sonneveld House is therefore not a dogmatic example of functionalism, but a personal environment.

That is to say, a building which is truly a work of art (and I consider none other) is in its nature, essence and physical being an emotional expression. This being so, and I feel deeply that it is so, it must have, almost literally, a life. It follows from this living principle that an ornamented structure should be characterized by this quality, namely, that the same emotional impulse shall flow throughout harmoniously into its varied forms of expression — of which, while the mass-composition is the more profound, the decorative ornamentation is the more intense. Yet must both spring from the same source of feeling.