M4| Friday, March 13, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
source: a daydream of Mr. van de
Gronden’s father, who imagined
Mei Lin and Sem, now 11 and 9,
respectively, walking down a
grand staircase and performing a
pageant on a stage.
To bring this vision to life, the
architects designed a dramatic,
open-plan, wide-step staircase, run-
ning the full length of the living
room, and a multifunctional, stage-I
n Rotterdam, the bustling
harbor and second-largest
city in the Netherlands, a
couple traded in one un-
usual home for another
when they decided to move from
a very narrow row house to a for-
mer school gym. Part of a plan by
the city to convert outdated
school buildings into residences,
the 2017 sale of the vast fixer-up-
per came with a price tag of ex-
actly one euro.
Eighteen months, $565,000, and
one gut renovation later, Flint van
de Gronden, a high-school princi-
pal, and Linda van Dijk, a dance
teacher and choreographer, moved
into their finished four-bedroom
loft in Rotterdam’s gentrifying Old
North district. The new two-story,
2,700-square-foot layout gives
them an upstairs master suite
while preserving the original 16-
foot ceilings in an enormous
ground-floor sitting area. The cou-
ple’s two young daughters, Mei Lin
and Sem, each have their own
bedrooms in a children’s suite off
the combined open-plan kitchen
and rear family room.
“This was essentially a giant
shoebox,” says Mr. van de Gron-
den, now 39 years old, of the orig-
inal empty gym—a 2,000-square-
foot room with a single, soaring
front wall of windows.
The conversion of the early
20th-century school building in-
cludes six other new units, rang-
ing in size from townhouses to
pieds-à-terre. Residents now live
in their own co-op, an arrange-
ment that helped spread out major
costs, such as an urgent over-
$500,000 upgrade to the building’s
foundation, and partially funds
certain structural costs to the cou-
ple’s home, such as new windows
in the back walls of the building.
Mr. van de Gronden and Ms. van
Dijk, 43, rejected a layout suggested
by the city, which would have re-
placed the unit’s loftiness with a
central, cluttering kitchen and more
expansive upper floor. They opted
instead for a custom design from
Jenny Eklund and Dominique ter
Beek, a pair of Rotterdam archi-
tects who had experience convert-
ing another local school space into
their own residential loft.
Mr. van de Gronden and Ms.
van Dijk derived the main idea for
their new home from an unlikely
BYJ.S.MARCUS
like platform in the front of the
apartment, just beneath the exist-
ing windows.
The stage, which is table
height, serves as a long work and
storage space, while providing
needed access to the windows
themselves, which start at 7 feet
above the floor. Sem also uses one
pillow-lined cupboard beneath the
stage as a playhouse.Bathrooms: $20,300
Plumbing: $23,700Structural renovation: $180,640The original windows, above, are accessed by the new platform. Ms. van Dijk in the
kitchen, left, which is built for two home cooks.Kitchen $17,000Plasterwork
& painting:
$19,200€1
Price for
unrenovated unit
($1.14)1930s row house, also located in
Old North—was only 10 feet wide,
which meant their compact furni-
ture would have looked minuscule
in the new loft. New purchases,
such as an extra-long leather sofa
for the living room, and the fam-
ily room’s expansive hanging
lamp from Italy’s Flos, are
minimalist in design but
maximal consumers of
space.
The Netherlands has
had one of Western Eu-
rope’s healthiest na-
tional real-estate mar-
kets, with Amsterdam and
Utrecht, its two strongest cities,
posting gains of well over 50% be-
tween the second quarters of 2014
and 2019, according to U.K.’s
Knight Frank. Despite its size and
prominence, Rotterdam has tended
to lag behind, but that has started
to change.
In 2018, Knight Frank says that
Rotterdam prices increased over
15%, the biggest gain seen in any
major city in Western Europe, in-
cluding its Dutch rivals.
Nick Forger, a Rotterdam bro-
ker with the Ooms Makelaars
agency, says that Old North, a
centrally located area now in the
early throes of gentrification, is
seeing especially strong increases.
He says that large, high-end units
like the transformed gymnasium
can get as much as $4,500 per
square meter on the open market,
which would put the current re-
sale value at about $1.125 million.
The family has no plans to move,
says Mr. van de Gronden, who is
looking ahead to enclosing the pa-
tio off the kitchen by realizing yet
another vision: a sheltered space
that feels entirely outdoors, due to
a 20-foot-high glass canopy. “We
bought for the long haul,” he adds.When it came to the kitchen,
the couple wanted free access, as
well as a narrow island, allowing
them both to cook at the same
time. Saving on the purchase
price freed up money for luxury
add-ons elsewhere. The pair
spiced up a standard IKEA
kitchen unit with Carrara
marble and opted for
huge oak planks for the
living room staircase.
The children’s suite
downstairs connects
to the parents’ suite
upstairs with a second,
more discreet staircase,
making the highly conspicuous
living room stairs, which cost
around $9,000, a decorative fea-
ture more than a necessity. “But it
doesn’t feel like a splurge,” says
Ms. van Dijk, “because I enjoy it
every day.”
The high ceilings and abundant
natural light tend to overpower
ordinary decorative touches, so
the couple have kept the home on
the spare side.
The family’s former home—a$1.125
MILLION
Potential resale
valueRENÉ DE WIT (5)
Linda van Dijk, walks up the new grand staircase in her family’s great room, which was formerly a school gymnasium.MANSION
BALANCE SHEET
From Gym to Gem
A Rotterdam couple bought a school gymnasium for a song,
and converted it into a spacious homeStairs: $9,100Floors: $15,800$565,000
Cost of renovationWoodwork $13,500NYThe Most Famous Home in
Bonita Springs!
Call 800.801.8003 to View - Appointments Available
1-4pm Sun March 15 & 22FLAUC LIC AU3383. 10% Buyer’s Premium.Jeffrey Ashby RE LIC 3421110; Williams & Williams Mrktg Srvcs, Inc. RE LIC 1032049; Thomas Barnes800.801.8003
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