Huis met de Kabouters: The Gnomes Who Play Ball
Why is it significant?
Look up at the gables of the building with the carved wooden balconies: two chubby green gnomes in red caps and red shorts, each about two and a half metres tall. One holds a red ball. The other leans forward with his hands out, waiting for the throw.
Key Facts
| Place | Huis met de Kabouters: The Gnomes Who Play Ball |
|---|---|
| Address | Ceintuurbaan 251-255, 1074 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.35580, 4.90440 |
| Part of Walk | Herring, Stroopwafels and Roti: A Food Walk Through Amsterdam's De Pijp |
| Generated | Generated |
Look up at the gables of the building with the carved wooden balconies: two chubby green gnomes in red caps and red shorts, each about two and a half metres tall. One holds a red ball. The other leans forward with his hands out, waiting for the throw. Amsterdammers call it the Huis met de Kabouters, the House with the Gnomes.
It is a joke, and a very Dutch one: a visual pun. The man who commissioned the building was called Van Ballegooijen, and in Dutch that surname sounds like ball-throwing. So the architect, A. C. Boerma, put two ball-throwers on the roof for everyone to see. Imagine signing a contract with your builder and finding that he had illustrated your surname three storeys high.
The building itself, finished in 1884, is three houses joined together, and it cannot decide what century it belongs to. There are pointed Gothic windows and little gargoyles, Renaissance-style cross windows and stone blocks, and so much carved woodwork that it looks like a Swiss chalet that has wandered into the city. It became a national monument in 1984.
Of course, gnomes come with legends. Some say the ball changes hands every night at midnight. Others insist it only happens on New Year's Eve... and the most patient version says you will see it only on the twenty-ninth of February, in a leap year. Nobody has filmed it yet.
There is a serious point under the joke. The Ceintuurbaan, the belt road, was laid out in the 1880s along the southern edge of the new quarter, at the same time as the cheap speculative blocks you saw earlier. While some builders cut every corner, someone here spent money on wood carving and humour, just to be noticed. Now walk to the end of the street, cross the Amstel on the Nieuwe Amstelbrug and follow the far bank north to a white palace on the water.