Van Duffelen & Pelt, the firm that built the corner

The firm's own display advertisement in the Rotterdam address book sets out the business in a few lines. Meubelfabrikanten, furniture manufacturers, at the head. A fabriek at Rochussenstraat 169. A magazijn downtown at Witte de Withstraat 57^1 2. A works and a shop, a maker and a seller, under one name.

Those two ends, the factory the men ran and the showroom that faced the customer, hold the whole story in small. How the firm set its name and addresses in display type is taken up in the corner's house style. This deep dive follows the company itself: who founded it, what it made, and how it left the corner it had commissioned.

Two men and a deed

Van Duffelen & Pelt was trading as an informal partnership about 1890, before it existed in law. On the first of January 1892 it thanked its customers on completing its afgeloopen tweede jaarkring, its second year, as Meubelfabriekanten en Stoffeerders at Lange Warande 75-77³.

On 24 June 1899 the partners made it a vennootschap before the Rotterdam notary C. M. H. Minderop, for ten years from the first of June⁴. That was the same month the first stone of the corner was laid⁵.

The two names on the firm belonged to the cabinet-makers Gijsbert Johannes van Duffelen and Cornelis Pelt⁶. The address book printed them as the firmanten in 1906, 1907 and again in 1910⁷. They commissioned the building themselves: the 1899 permit was taken out voor rekening van de Heeren van Duffelen en Pelt, with the Firma J. van Hattem as builder⁸. The firm's two constitutive deeds, one preserved and one lost, have their own evidence set.

The firm moved in before the building was finished. By 3 August 1900 it was operating at the junction of the Rochussenstraat and the 's-Gravendijkwal⁹.

By that November a partner was living above the new works, a year before 1901, the completion date usually given for the building^10 11. The ordinary troubles of a working building followed almost at once. In early November 1900 burglars smashed a window in the front door and broke in¹². The electric bell woke the resident, three young men were arrested nearby, and the thieves fled empty-handed^13 14.

Before the corner, the firm had worked from a documented run of downtown premises: Lange Warande, then a workshop on the Haagscheveer from about 1894¹⁵. From November 1902 it also kept a downtown showroom alongside the factory¹⁶. Those streets, with the one surviving photograph of a shop interior, are gathered as the firm's other addresses.

The makers lived at their own works. The 1911 street list gives the corner three lettered addresses: 169a G. J. van Duffelen, 169b the firm itself, 169c Cornelis Pelt¹⁷. From 1906, before the lettered split, the address book had already placed the firm and both partners at a plain "169"¹⁸. Neighbours used the works as a landmark. A household advertisement of October 1906 gave its address as the second house from the 's-Gravendijkwal, beside the Van Duffelen & Pelt furniture factory¹⁹.

A third name, 1909

When the first term ran out the firm was renewed with a third name. The 1909 partnership deed was executed on 12 June 1909 before the notary Willem van Traa and published in the Staatscourant three days later²⁰. It joined G. J. van Duffelen, Cornelis Pelt and August Frans Antoon Maria Wille²¹. The deed plainly named the firm's object as the business of furniture manufacturers, and expressly continued what the two founders already ran²². A tacit-renewal clause rolled the partnership over year by year unless notice was given, which is why no dissolution deed need ever have existed²³.

Wille was no cabinet-maker. Born in Amsterdam, of German-Catholic descent, he came in as a particulier, a man of private means putting capital into a firm of makers²⁴. He joined without a trade and later left Rotterdam for Apeldoorn; he has his own deep dive.

What it made

Van Duffelen & Pelt were makers before they were sellers, and the trade lists show it. In the earliest directories, of 1901 and 1903, the firm is filed under furniture JOINERS, schrijnwerkers, makers in wood²⁵. The upholsterers' label appears only from 1904²⁶. Dealing came later still. In 1912 the firm was first entered as a RETAILER too, and so stood in three trades at once: maker, upholsterer and dealer²⁷. The directory's own headings trace the arc of the whole business, making first and selling last²⁸.

The first glimpse of the goods comes a decade before the corner. In a clearance sale of November 1892 the firm, still on the Lange Warande and short of room, offered four mahogany linen cupboards, a walnut salon cabinet, a table and a bonheur²⁹.

At the top end it made work to order. Its earliest documented masterpiece is a set of carved-oak book cabinets, made in the Haagscheveer workshop in 1895 for the doctoral jubilee of the Rotterdam physician Dr. S. J. Halbertsma³⁰. The press called it a meesterstuk van meubelfabricatie³¹.

Three named Rotterdam decorative-arts men worked on it: Arij Spoon designed it, the sculptor Simon Miedema modelled it, and W. A. Fabri painted its imitation gobelin³². Where that one piece went is a chase of its own. The firm also did fixed woodwork for interiors. In 1907 it made the betimmeringen for the rebuilt shop of the watchmaker-jeweller G. Brunott on the Binnenweg, as part of a named team of architect and contractors³³. From November 1902 it had advertised parquet-laying and panelling for offices and rooms beside its furniture³⁴.

By early 1909 its advertisements offered Complete Woning-, Winkel- en Kantoorinrichtingen, the complete fitting-out of shops and offices as well as homes, from the magazijn at Witte de Withstraat 57 and the fabriek at Rochussenstraat 169³⁵.

In the shop it also sold decorative lines it did not make, above all Faience Amphora^36 37. By March 1909 it was advertising the line in the Amsterdam art daily De Kunst, two years before the 1911 notice we hold, with its two telephones, 3341 and 47, printed side by side^38 39.

Our one look inside the works comes from a trade weekly that visited at the end of 1906 and reported in the Industrieel Weekblad of 11 January 1907. Its photographs show the machine shop, the furniture workshop with about twenty men at their benches, the upholstery room, two finished suites the firm had made, and the downtown showroom⁴⁰. The visitors counted no fewer than 400 profile chisels for making mouldings⁴¹. They also recorded a 13-horsepower Trusty gas engine that had run the plant for seven years without a day's interruption⁴².

That visit has its own deep dive. In April the same weekly listed Van Duffelen & Pelt on the jury of a Rotterdam exhibition, judging others' work instead of being judged⁴³. It is the nearest thing to a professional distinction the record gives the firm⁴⁴.

So far nothing shows that it ever won a medal, entered a fair or registered a mark of its own, and one register that could still settle it has not been read⁴⁵. That is the trademark question⁴⁶.

One thing the firm made may survive. Two chairs kept in the family of the founder Cornelis Pelt are held by his descendants to have been made in the factory: the firm's own furniture, handed down through a cabinet-maker's household.

Both are oak with woven rush seats, and both use the same ornament: bands of sawn geometric fretwork, rows of small turned spindles, reeded posts and plain box stretchers. The first is a two-sided corner chair, a hoekstoel. The second is a tall-backed armchair with a heart pierced through its arched crest rail. That shared vocabulary is merely consistent with a single workshop, and it does not prove the chairs were made at Rochussenstraat 169. Their manner, the Dutch Arts-and-Crafts style called Nieuwe Kunst, of about 1895 to 1910, falls well inside the firm's making years.

The plant and the hands

The works ran on power. The 1905 address book calls the corner a stoommeubelfabriek, a steam furniture factory; one year's directory label is not a survey of the machinery, but it most probably means the plant ran by steam⁴⁸. The 1907 visit adds a 13-horsepower gas engine driving the tools⁴⁹.

The firm's hiring for the plant is documented from 1900 onward: skilled meubelmakers and an upholsterer within months of completion, then half-trained men, a machine woodworker and boys for the trade⁵⁰. The fullest account is the corner's own register of work⁵¹. The terms these men worked under are on record too. In the spring of 1907 Van Duffelen & Pelt was among the Rotterdam employers who granted the furniture trade's ten-hour day and a wage rise⁵².

One legal file would show the whole plant: the Hinderwet nuisance-permit file, with its machine inventory and workshop plan. It is the file we cannot yet read. The firm's telephone at the premises, 47, starts a line that runs through four firms and a hundred years⁵³.

Gone from the corner, 1916

The last advertisement we have traced from the firm at the corner dates from 20 March 1916⁵⁴.

The firm did not dissolve when it left. The evidence points to a probable change of business, from a vertically-integrated MAKER at an industrial corner to a furnishing RETAILER in the city centre; its showroom had moved downtown years before⁵⁵. The directories' later entries show most clearly why a trade listing cannot be treated as proof of occupancy. The street lists went on printing Van Duffelen & Pelt as meubelfabrikanten at 169 for seven years after that last advertisement, through 1923⁵⁶. Meanwhile the firm's own recruitment and advertising at the address fell silent, and a new firm was hiring there from January 1921⁵⁷. Even the printed unit numbers wandered: 169a one year, 169a-c the next, 169a-b the year after, though nobody moved⁵⁸. That was an unsteady compositor, not a history of the building⁵⁹.

The two founders left the building that same season. Cornelis Pelt gave up 169c on 22 March 1921⁶⁰, and the van Duffelen family left for Zeist on 4 May 1921⁶¹. The men and their families, the Vlaardingen founder with his emigrant children and the Crooswijk cabinet-maker with his line, are followed in the van Duffelen family and the Pelt household.

Folded into the Coolsingel, 1922

The firm's own fate played out quietly downtown. By 30 September 1922 Van Duffelen & Pelt was trading as one of the firms within N.V. Beens' Woninginrichting-Maatschappij at its Coolsingel 49 showrooms, alongside the Schiedam firm Kam & Van Rhijn⁶².

That showroom entry shows that the firm that had commissioned the corner in 1899 was now under the roof of the company that had taken over its factory from January 1921^63 64. It brought its old Rochussenstraat telephone number, 47, into the joint showroom⁶⁵. The works and the firm that had commissioned them had gone their separate ways. The factory's next tenant is the company that ran it next. The founders lived on a little longer, both away from the corner: Gijsbert Johannes van Duffelen died in 1928⁶⁶, and Cornelis Pelt in 1937⁶⁷. The corner they commissioned outlasted them both, and the founders' chapter keeps coming back to the firm whose name it first carried.