Continental Carpet, and its afterlife

A shop can close in an afternoon; a company can outlast it by decades. A concern sold carpets and curtain stuffs at Rochussenstraat 169a from 1928, on the adresboek's evidence, and the telephone directories carry it on to the closing-down sales of 1936^1 2. It stayed on file long after the shop's last recorded advertisements. In Dutch it was the N.V. Continentale Tapijt en Meubelstoffen Handelmaatschappij. Its English name, which the 1976 notice still printed, was the Continental Carpet and Furnishing Company.

A distinct Beens company

Hermanus Petrus Beens had directed N.V. Beens' Woninginrichting-Maatschappij since it was founded in 1918, at first as its sole director³, and from January 1921 he had worked the corner as its furniture factory⁴. That firm would not be liquidated until 1927–28⁵. In the autumn of 1926, while it was still operating, he registered a new company beside it⁶.

On 2 September 1926 the Handelsregister, the commercial register, recorded a one-man business at Coolsingel 103b: the Continental Carpet and Furnishing Company, wholesalers in carpets and furnishing fabrics, sole owner H. P. Beens⁷. The new firm therefore started downtown, not at Rochussenstraat 169: the old firm's showrooms stood at Coolsingel 103 and 103a⁸. The Beens business had been on the Coolsingel since 1918, first at no. 56, where an advertisement of June 1918 announced a picture-exhibition bovenzaal, an upstairs hall, over a showroom displaying Persian carpets⁹. This was a second Beens vehicle running in parallel, and the old firm carried on under its own name. By 1928 the firm was listed at Rochussenstraat 169a¹⁰.

Five days later the business was floated as a naamlooze vennootschap, a limited company or N.V., with a capital of f50,000¹¹. A hundred of its five hundred shares were placed and paid, and Beens was the director¹². On 2 December the one-man business was formally converted into the N.V.¹³. A little over a year later a company yearbook listed it again, among statute amendments gazetted on 21 December 1927. That suggests the young company was probably redrawing its own rules about fifteen months after it was formed, though the entry is a summary, not the deed itself¹⁴.

The trade press announced the founding that September:

The old firm went out the ordinary way, in a clearance:

Behind both companies stood the Beens brothers, Hermanus Petrus and the elder Fredericus Johannes¹⁵. For the Continental company, though, the register records F. J. with a procuration, not a directorship¹⁶. Where the brothers went after the corner is told in their own deep dive.

What it traded, and under which name

Continental Carpet was an agency house. It represented the Belgian furniture maker De Coene of Kortrijk in the Netherlands, and in February 1928 it showed that maker's Queen Anne, Sheraton and English-renaissance pieces and modern office furniture at the W.I.M.B.A. in Rotterdam¹⁷. In September 1930 it was among the exhibitors at the Utrecht Jaarbeurs, with carpets, curtain fabrics and lampshades¹⁸.

It took the shop at Rochussenstraat 169a in 1928¹⁹. H. P. Beens himself lived in the building, at 169b from August 1927²⁰, and his brother Fredericus Johannes appears among the building's residents in the surrounding years, at 169a in 1926 and 169c in 1927^21 22 23. The 1929 telephone directory shows the arrangement exactly: the director listed over his own shop, on the shop's own line.

On 17 January 1928 a Handelsregister notice recorded that F. J. Beens's procuration had been withdrawn²⁴. At the end of 1929 H. P. Beens moved within the building, from 169b to 169c²⁵. On 3 August 1931 the authorities struck his household off the register ambtshalve, to Teddington in London²⁶. By that November the register named him, now of London, as a supervisory director who had formerly been the director²⁷.

In June 1930 the firm put up for sale, from Rochussenstraat 169, several used trapnaaimachines, treadle sewing machines, and a batch of upholsterers' fournituren, or trimmings²⁸:

Through those years the corner traded under a short name, Furnishco, cut down from Furnishing Company²⁹. The register entered it as a wholesaler at 169a in September 1932^30 31. The names changed but the telephone number did not³², and that is a story of the premises rather than the firms. Exactly which company was registered behind the Furnishco name remains an open question of its own.

The clearance, and the shell

Nine years after the clearance that had made way for it, the shop ended in one of its own. On 14 July 1936 the firm advertised an algeheele uitverkoop wegens opheffing van bedrijf, a total closing-down sale on the winding-up of the business, and on 26 September a Likwidatie Uitverkoop followed³³:

The autumn advertisement offered dining rooms, bedrooms, salons, club chairs and club tables, along with woven fabrics, curtain plush, net curtains, carpets, runners and Gobelin tapestries, all at unprecedentedly low prices:

The advertisements show that Furnishco offered a closing-down sale. They do not show that the sale was completed, or exactly which legal person stood behind the trade name³⁴. That legal person stayed on file. In February 1976 a statutory notice in the NRC Handelsblad named the same company as an investment company: B.V. Beleggingsmaatschappij voorheen Naamloze Vennootschap Continentale Tapijt en Meubelstoffen Handelmaatschappij (Continental Carpet and Furnishing Company)³⁵:

The carpet importer had become a beleggingsmaatschappij, an investment company, and the 1976 notice still printed its English name³⁶.

What can, and cannot, be recovered

Who ran the company later is unknown in the records used here. A search of the name index of the Nationaal Archief Bedrijvenregister Zuid-Holland found neither Furnishco nor Continental Carpet, though that result does not settle what another archive might hold³⁷. The 1976 notice is the latest press item used in this deep dive.