N.V. Mij. voor Woninginrichting P. van Reeuwijk
In the late spring of 1940 the shop on the corner passed, for some months, to a firm that had come out of a burning city. Van Reeuwijk's Maatschappij voor Woninginrichting, a home-furnishing company, opened temporary showrooms at Rochussenstraat 169 on Thursday 23 May 1940, nine days after the bombing that destroyed the Rotterdam city centre and, with it, the firm's own store on the Nieuwe Binnenweg. Its emergency store on the Nieuwe Binnenweg opened in September, yet a December notice still gave 169 as the company's office . The papers show the address put to different uses, then, and no settled date on which the showroom closed . The firm did not stay long at the corner. By the time it arrived it was a quarter of a century old and had already been destroyed once.
Founded in the Kipstraat, 1915
The company began on 1 February 1915 as a furniture warehouse in the Kipstraat, in the old heart of Rotterdam, where customers were served out of stock rather than from a showroom. Its founder, Pieter Nicolaas van Reeuwijk, was born in Rotterdam on 22 November 1889. Furniture ran in the family. His birth act names his father as the cabinet-maker Klaas van Reeuwijk, so the trade was inherited before the firm was founded.
Birth act No. 6002, Rotterdam. On 25 Nov 1889 the midwife Hendrika Johanna Visser née Neitz (47) declared that on 22 Nov 1889 at 7 p.m., in a house on the Ravensteinstraat[?], a male child was born to Arina Bot (no occupation, wife of) Klaas van Reeuwijk, cabinetmaker, both resident here; the child to be named Pieter Nicolaas. Witnesses: two municipal officials.
He did not found it alone. On 21 August 1913, a year and a half before the doors opened, he married Johanna Maria van Walsum. The marriage register gives his age as twenty-three and his trade already as koopman in meubelen, a furniture dealer. It names the bride's father as Johannes Abraham van Walsum, who would sit on the firm's own supervisory board in 1929.
Marriage act No. 2459, Rotterdam, 21 Aug 1913. Pieter Nicolaas van Reeuwijk (23, furniture dealer), son of Klaas van Reeuwijk (53, furniture dealer) and Arina Bot, married Johanna Maria van Walsum (21), daughter of Johannes Abraham van Walsum (grocer/fats dealer) and Johanna Maria Laurens. Witnesses included the bride's uncle Martinus Simon van Walsum and the groom's brother-in-law.
A golden-jubilee notice named them both: the firm had been established by the late P. N. van Reeuwijk together with his wife, Johanna Maria van Reeuwijk-van Walsum, who laid the ground for the business at Kipstraat 11–13. At the fortieth-anniversary reception in 1955 she received a trade-association gold medal as directrice, and the report credited her with forty years at the head of the business. That is evidence of her reported practical leadership. The 1942 shareholders' roster is another kind of document, a dated list of formal appointments, and it does not establish her place in the N.V.'s statutory organs.
The warehouse grew fast. On 22 April 1919 van Reeuwijk opened a newly built extension to the Kipstraat premises, with a modern shopfront and model rooms. By the later 1920s the firm occupied a run of buildings from Kipstraat 11 to 27, with warehouses, showrooms and the director's own home among them.
> The new premises of the firm P. van Reeuwijk. > Today Mr P. van Reeuwijk opens a newly-built extension of his furniture warehouse at Kipstraat 11–19. > Under the architecture of Mr W. J. Mommaal — assisted by the firms W. K. F. Banis (lighting), Paludanus > (paintwork) and Cleton (leaded glass) — a chic interior has been created with several model rooms in > which the displayed furniture shows to good effect. The modern shopfront, too, makes a pleasing > impression and invites one to look. Translation notes: names/address verbatim. glas-in-lood = leaded / stained glass; winkelpui = shopfront; geëtaleerd = displayed (as in a shop window). NB the architect W. J. Mommaal is the van Reeuwijk Kipstraat designer — unrelated to the Rochussenstraat-169 architect question (N. Tinbergen).
That day the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad described the new premises at Kipstraat 11–19 as a chic interieur of model rooms behind a modern shopfront. The architect was W. J. Mommaal, with Banis for the lighting, Paludanus for the paintwork and Cleton for the leaded glass. Even then the firm presented itself as a modern woninginrichting.
The fire, 27 April 1929
On the night of 27 April 1929 it all burned. The local paper called the blaze a laaiende vuurzee (a roaring sea of fire). In a few hours it turned the van Reeuwijk furniture warehouses into a ruin, along with a block of some fifteen to seventeen adjoining houses, across roughly 4,500 square metres; the damage ran past a million guilders and seventeen families lost their homes. The family got out, the director carrying a child down the stairs. A reporter gave the probable cause as electrical, in a sample-room beside the office near the switchboard. The fire was photographed through the night and into the next day, and five frames from the series are held here.
The firm's own name-sign identifies the scene. It still hangs from a steel beam above a shopfront reduced to charred beams and rubble:
The shopfront lettering "P. van Reeuwijk" survives on a steel beam over the burnt-out interior.
The lettering identifies the ruins as van Reeuwijk's beyond doubt. The other frames show the fire itself and what it left. In the night view, firemen and onlookers stand on a wet cobbled street in a tangle of hoses while jets of water arc into a blazing building several storeys high. A …MEUBILEERING fascia and a tall SHELL advertising column place it on a Rotterdam street, so the picture shows more than just a fire. Beside it, a daylight frame shows the building's structural frame stripped bare, the brick facade half-standing at the upper floors and the storeys inside collapsed into rubble:
Two more photographs record the aftermath, one from the ground and one from above. The daytime overview shows gutted, roofless brick shells, twisted iron roof-trusses and smoking rubble, with the intact Concordia building behind them fixing the spot. The elevated frame looks across the whole burnt-out block to a Rotterdam skyline of gables, church towers and a windmill:
The fire also made the local front page. On 29 April 1929 the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad ran it under a banner, Groote brand op de Kipstraat … een vuurzee als in geen jaren aanschouwd … bebouwde oppervlakte van 4500 M² in enkele uren een ruïne. The paper gave the figures no photograph can: a built area of some 4,500 square metres reduced to a ruin in a few hours, and a total loss of more than a million guilders.
Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad, Monday 29 April 1929, fourth sheet. "Great fire on the Kipstraat — a sea of flame unseen for years — a built area of 4,500 m² a ruin within hours — total damage over 1,000,000 guilders." On Saturday evening just after 10:30 a tremendous fire broke out in the warehouses of N.V. Piet van Reeuwijk, the well-known furniture dealer at Kipstraat 11–27, so huge that one must recall the 1902 fire at the Van der Lugt crate-works on the Prins Hendrikkade for comparison. Photos show the devastation of the warehouses, what remained of van Reeuwijk's fine store the next morning, and mothers returning to the Breedestraat after the danger had passed.
The fire drove the firm to the Nieuwe Binnenweg and soon led it to change its statutes. It was already being called a naamlooze vennootschap: the fire report of 29 April 1929 names it N.V. Piet van Reeuwijk, almost five months before the Royal Decree. That autumn its gewijzigde statuten, its amended statutes, cleared the ministry, and by 1938 the firm was stock-listed. Het Vaderland printed the change that October.
> Company for Home Furnishing Piet van Reeuwijk. > In a supplement to Government Gazette No. 197 the statutes have been published of the N.V. Company for Home Furnishing Piet van Reeuwijk, at Rotterdam, authorised by Royal Decree of 19 September 1929, with a capital of ƒ1,100,000 divided into 1,000 ordinary and 100 six-per-cent cumulative preference shares of ƒ1,000 each, of which 259 [ordinary] and 100 preference shares have been placed. > Director: Mr P. N. van Reeuwijk of Rotterdam; supervisory directors: Messrs J. P. Alofs (Bussum), M. A. van Bateles [?] (Enschede), S. van Dantzig (Rotterdam) and J. A. van Walsum, merchant (Rotterdam). > The company's object is wholesale and retail trade in all merchant goods in the field of home furnishing, for its own or third parties' account, the founding of and participation in related businesses, in the widest sense, and the management of other similar undertakings.
Under the Royal Decree of 19 September 1929 the amended statutes set a capital of ƒ1,100,000 in ordinary and six-per-cent preference shares. P. N. van Reeuwijk was named director, and his father-in-law J. A. van Walsum sat on the supervisory board. A second, financial notice settles a figure the firm's own record had left open. The placed and paid-up capital was ƒ359,000, on gewijzigde statuten passed with a ministerial declaration of no objection:
> COMPANY FOR HOME FURNISHING PIET VAN REEUWIJK. > Authorised capital ƒ1,100,000, of which ƒ359,000 placed and fully paid. > The ministerial declaration of no-objection to the amended statutes of the company for home furnishing Piet van Reeuwijk at Rotterdam has been issued, per Government Gazette No. 197. > The company's capital now amounts to ƒ1,100,000, divided into 1,000 ordinary shares of ƒ1,000 each and 100 six-per-cent cumulative preference shares, likewise of ƒ1,000 each. > The capital was subscribed by Mr P. N. van Reeuwijk privately for 139 ordinary shares and the 100 six-per-cent cumulative preference shares, and in his capacity as director of N.V. Piet van Reeuwijk's General Trading Company for 100 ordinary shares; by Mr Van Walsum for 15 ordinary shares; and by Mr Hulsker for 5 ordinary shares — all issued fully paid.
Eleven years after the Kipstraat fire, on 14 May 1940, the Nieuwe Binnenweg store was destroyed in its turn . Burnt out in 1929 and bombed out in 1940, the firm came to the corner as a tenant.
The corner in 1940
Nine days after the bombing, the firm was open again at Rochussenstraat 169. A display advertisement announced the opening, the stock and where to find it:
> VAN REEUWIJK'S > COMPANY FOR HOME FURNISHING > Offices provisionally located: BERGSINGEL No. 72 > > IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT > Our manufacturers and other suppliers have, with great goodwill, placed at our disposal a large and splendid collection of > Bedrooms - Living rooms - Sitting rooms > Office installations - Carpets - Curtains > which we are going to sell in our new temporary > SHOWROOMS ROCHUSSENSTRAAT 169 > WHICH WILL BE OPENED NEXT THURSDAY 23 MAY > Complete home furnishing > DIRECT DELIVERY > VAN REEUWIJK'S > COMPANY FOR HOME FURNISHING > ROCHUSSENSTRAAT 169 > Telephone New Showrooms 30047
The offices, it said, were provisionally at Bergsingel 72, and the showrooms at 169 were new and temporary. On offer were bedrooms, living rooms, sitting rooms, office fit-outs, carpets and curtains, supplied for sale by manufacturers and other suppliers. The number given for the new showrooms was the corner's telephone line, 30047. In September a report described the emergency store opening on the Nieuwe Binnenweg, with eighteen display windows, a gallery through to the Breitnerstraat, electric heating and a carpet department upstairs. The same report says showrooms had been fitted out on Rochussenstraat after the bombing. In December a meeting notice placed the company's office at 169, not its showrooms. These records leave the exact end of shop use at the corner uncertain.
> The first large emergency store in Rotterdam opened > > The first large emergency store in Rotterdam — the complex of showrooms of the N.V. Maatschappij van > woninginrichting P. van Reeuwijk on the Nieuwe Binnenweg — was officially opened yesterday afternoon, before > a large gathering, by a representative of the municipal authority. > > A few days after the disaster that struck the Maas city on 14 May, the management of Piet van Reeuwijk had > already laid plans to resume trading as soon as possible, and so, thanks to the co-operation of many — not > least the staff — showrooms were fitted out on the Rochussenstraat. Not satisfied with this makeshift, > the director was among the first to ask the municipal authority for land on which to put up emergency > premises, which have now risen on the Nieuwe Binnenweg. > > Like all emergency premises the building is of brick on a concrete footing. Given the nature of the trade > much glass has been used: no fewer than 18 display windows give the passer-by the chance to acquaint himself > with the various styles of furnishing. Some of these windows are set in a gallery forming the link between > the Nieuwe Binnenweg and the Breitnerstraat. On the first floor of the building, which is heated entirely by > electricity, a large collection of furniture has likewise been brought together, and there too is the carpet > department. Both the exterior, kept in light colours, and the tastefully appointed interior — given > distinction by paintings by MacLean — entirely dispel the impression of an emergency building. > > Mr S. van Dantzig, chairman of the supervisory board of the N.V. Piet van Reeuwijk, gave the opening > address, after which Mr C. Küppers, on behalf of the Mayor and Aldermen of Rotterdam, expressed appreciation > of the energy and drive with which Rotterdam's businessmen are filled. In his words of thanks Mr van > Reeuwijk addressed the architect and the contractor, the staff, and MacLean, whose paintings are exhibited > in the emergency premises. He recalled that within ten years the business has twice been destroyed. The > first time it was trading again within a fortnight, and this time within a few days, which is owing to the > staff.
The December notice called shareholders to a general meeting on Tuesday 24 December 1940 ten kantore der Vennootschap, Rochussenstraat 169, at the offices of the company, Rochussenstraat 169. The agenda could be consulted next door, at Rochussenstraat 171:
"N.V. Company for Home-Furnishing P. van Reeuwijk, Rotterdam. General Meeting of Shareholders on Tuesday 24 December next, at the company's office, Rochussenstraat 169, Rotterdam, at 11.45 a.m. The agenda is available for inspection at the office of the N.V., Rochussenstraat 171, Rotterdam, and can be obtained from the ROTTERDAMSCHE …" (text cut off).
No other document puts the firm's registered office, and not merely its showrooms, at 169 in the winter of 1940. It is also the one that brings in 171, the second house from the corner, so often mistaken for it.
The man whose name was over the door did not live behind it. The director lived elsewhere: his household card records the family at a string of Rotterdam addresses, then at Hillegersberg from 1929 and Hilversum from 1930.
Housing (chronology): Boezemsingel 212b[?]; a street at no. 60a and Kipstraat 29a; (1924) Goudschesingel 227b[?]; (1929) Oost Zeedijk p.37[?]; (26 Oct 1932) Oost Zeedijk 62. Previous residence references: the family cards of Klaas van Reeuwijk and Johanna Maria van Walsum. Departures/destinations: (16 Nov 1929) a Molenlaan 92 address, "married to de Lange[?]"; (20 Sep 1930) Hilversum, a boarding school "Hill House"[?]. Legal domicile: Dutch Reformed[?]; 1929 agenda, dossier 20. Remarks: returned 8 Dec 1945.
He ran the shop at the corner but never lived in it. The people who actually staffed a van Reeuwijk shop have their own story, told through . The shadow the war later cast over the firm's directors is .
After the corner: the Binnenweg years
The firm left 169 in 1940 and carried on without it for another forty years. Pieter Nicolaas van Reeuwijk died on 22 May 1949. The next day the Algemeen Handelsblad reported that death had come suddenly, at his home on the Oostzeedijk, at fifty-nine. The obituary also recorded that he had begun omstreeks 1914 in een klein benedenhuis, in a small ground-floor place, and that his thirty-five years of work were to be crowned by a new building that he did not live to see opened, which the obituary places on the Oude Binnenweg. Later sources give the firm's post-war address as Binnenwegplein 26.
P. N. van Reeuwijk †. In the night from Saturday to Sunday, Mr P. N. van Reeuwijk, director of the N.V. Furnishing Company P. van Reeuwijk, died suddenly at his home on the Oostzeedijk in Rotterdam. Mr van Reeuwijk was 59 years old. The crowning of 35 years of hard work — the opening of the new building now rising on the Oude Binnenweg, with which he had hoped to realise large-scale future plans — he was not permitted to witness. It was around 1914 that Mr van Reeuwijk began selling furniture in a small basement dwelling. The business flourished, and so, some years later, he opened a small shop in the Kipstraat. This became the modest beginning of a large retail complex, formed over the years by buying up adjacent plots and even a school building. On 27 April 1929 a huge fire — for which nearly all of Rotterdam's fire-fighting equipment turned out — reduced this complex to ashes. A new shop building then rose on the same spot, but it fell victim to the violence of war in the May days of 1940. The business was continued in a large temporary building on the Nieuwe Binnenweg.
A son, Klaas, died in Rotterdam six months after his father, on 18 November 1949, though only a single family-notice index entry makes him the founder's son, and the identification is best held as probable. Pieter Nicolaas’s widow, Johanna, outlived him by nearly thirty years. At the firm's fortieth jubilee in 1955 she was credited with forty years at its head, from the founding. The 1971 portrait used here shows her in the firm's post-war flagship showroom on the Binnenwegplein:
She sits at a low table in the showroom, pen over a notepad, with a bombé chest and an upholstered chair behind her. She died at Nice, in France, in April 1977, aged eighty-five. A Rotterdam yearbook's necrology described her as a joint founder and former director of the firm.
By then the firm was near its own end. After the war it had rebuilt at Binnenwegplein 26 with model-room showrooms and traded as a stock-listed company under president-director T. Terlouw. By about 1980 it had grown into a group of some 290 staff, working through subsidiaries with names like De Tijdgeest and Woonstad. At its golden jubilee in 1965, fifty years after the Kipstraat founding, the company resolved to propose a fifty-per-cent share bonus under the 1957 recapitalisation act:
> Van Reeuwijk gives a 50 per cent bonus > The Company for Home Furnishing P. van Reeuwijk has resolved — on the occasion of the celebration that > the foundations of the business were laid 50 years ago — to propose, availing itself of the > Recapitalisation Act 1957, that a bonus of 50 per cent be placed at the disposal of shareholders. > Besides this 50 per cent bonus in shares, not sharing in the pro[fit for the current financial year] […]
The firm kept marking its anniversaries to the end. A notice records that on Wednesday 1 October 1975, from four to six, the board and management held a reception at Binnenwegplein 26 for the firm's sixtieth year and for the fortieth jubilee of president-director T. Terlouw.
> The supervisory board and management of NV Woninginrichting P. van Reeuwijk of Rotterdam will celebrate, on Wednesday 1 October from 4 to 6 o'clock with a reception in their building at Binnenwegplein 26 in Rotterdam, the 60-year existence of the firm and the 40-year jubilee of president-director T. Terlouw.
Vroom & Dreesmann built up its stake from around a tenth in 1977 to two-fifths. After the firm booked a five-million-guilder loss in 1980, Vroom & Dreesmann made a formal offer for the outstanding shares on 16 June 1981. The notice offered copies of the acquisition terms and set a deadline for tenders.
N.V. Company for Home Furnishing Van Reeuwijk The undersigned announces that copies of the Notice concerning the offer for the acquisition of the still-outstanding ordinary shares and founders' certificates of N.V. Company for Home Furnishing Van Reeuwijk are available at the offices of Algemene Bank Nederland N.V. in Amsterdam. Tender for acquisition must be lodged no later than Wednesday 15 July 1981 at 3 p.m. at the above office. Amsterdam, 16 June 1981 VROOM & DREESMANN
It records the offer; it does not record that the takeover was completed.
The fortieth anniversary, in 1955, had been the fuller occasion. At the reception of 3 February the association's representative presented the gold medal to the directrice:
> Jubilee of N.V. P. van Reeuwijk > (From our correspondent) Rotterdam, 4 Feb. At the reception held yesterday on the occasion of the > fortieth jubilee of the N.V. Company for Home Furnishing P. van Reeuwijk, Mr C. van der Linden, on > behalf of the Royal Netherlands Middenstandsbond, Rotterdam branch, presented the golden medal of the > association to the directrice of the jubilating company, Mrs Van Reeuwijk-Van Walsum […]
The papers disagree about whose medal it was. In the Algemeen Handelsblad shown here, C. van der Linden presents it namens de Koninklijke Nederlandse Middenstandsbond, afdeling Rotterdam. The Rotterdamsch Parool names the same man as chairman of the Rotterdamse Middenstandsvereniging Handel en Nijverheid and calls the medal that society's gouden gedenkpenning. The Parool gives more detail and calls her het eerste directielid van een N.V., the first board member of a limited company, to receive the distinction. That report does not settle her statutory role.
FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF VAN REEUWIJK: Hundreds of congratulations in hall full of floral arrangements Yesterday afternoon, the management of P. van Reeuwijks Woninginrichting was busy for hours shaking hands. In the Schotse kerk across the street, on the occasion of the firm's fortieth anniversary, hundreds of friends and business associates gave the banquet hall an exceptionally pleasant and festive atmosphere, which was certainly further enhanced by the presence of an impressive collection of floral arrangements. Mrs. Van Reeuwijk-Van Walsum was the center of all the warm attention. She was thoroughly put in the spotlight by several speakers. One of them was Mr. C. van der Linden, chairman of the Rotterdamse Middenstandsvereniging „Handel en Nijverheid”. He recalled that, despite its significant growth, the firm Van Reeuwijk had nevertheless always continued to be regarded as a middle-class business. That was also why Mr. Van der Linden was able to present the directress with the gold commemorative medal of „Handel en Nijverheid”. She was the first board member of an N.V. to receive such a distinction. Mr. A. Nieuwland conveyed congratulations on behalf of the company's entire staff, who were represented by a delegation. They did not come empty-handed; the jubilee gift was a large tile tableau depicting the two earlier premises and the present building on the Binnenweg. The chairman of the supervisory board, prof. mr. G. de Grooth, drew a comparison in a speech between the development of the firm Van Reeuwijk and the city of Rotterdam; both have suffered setbacks, but both have become increasingly important. Prof. De Grooth presented Mrs. Van Reeuwijk with a cigarette box. Speeches were further given by Messrs. J. A. de Bruyne and J. Muusse, both close associates. The latter presented a painting depicting the first premises on the Kipstraat. Among the very many other visitors were also business associates from across the borders.
In December 1958 a report described plans to add two complete storeys to the Binnenweg building by March 1960:
In English: if all goes to plan, N.V. P. van Reeuwijk will by March 1960 — exactly ten years after the new building on the Binnenweg was officially taken into use — have gained two complete additional storeys.
Two pictures of the firm's own past were given that day. A business relation offered a painting of the original Kipstraat shop, and the staff gave a large tegeltableau, a tiled panel, showing the two former premises with the current Binnenweg building. Neither the painting nor the tableau has been traced.
What survives
The Rotterdam commercial-register index lists N.V. Maatschappij voor Woninginrichting P. van Reeuwijk and two earlier personal files, but the files themselves are not digitised and are held at the national archive. What we have includes civil records, the 1919 shop opening, photographs and reporting of the 1929 fire, the 1940 emergency-premises notices, jubilee reporting and the 1971 portrait.