⁷Three Names, One Telephone

In the autumn of 1926 a Rotterdam merchant signed three notices in three months, and set the corner on a new course without anyone at Rochussenstraat 169 lifting a hammer. On 2 September the Handelsregister, the commercial register, entered a one-man business at Coolsingel 103b: the Continental Carpet and Furnishing Company, wholesalers in carpets and furnishing fabrics, sole owner H. P. Beens¹. Five days later the same concern became a naamlooze vennootschap (a limited company, N.V.) with a capital of f50,000 in five hundred shares of a hundred guilders each². A hundred of them were placed and fully paid, and H. P. Beens was its director³. On 2 December the register recorded that the sole business had been converted into the N.V. under the same director⁴.

Beens was no stranger. Hermanus Petrus Beens had run a home-furnishing company from this very corner for most of the previous decade. When N.V. Beens' Woninginrichting-Maatschappij was founded in 1918 he was its sole director, with three supervisory directors and an authorised capital of half a million guilders drawn up in ten series⁵. That company wound up between 1926 and 1928, through a liquidation proposal, a run of closing sales and a final auction⁶. So the corner stayed with Beens, who carried his trade into a new legal company. Afterwards Beens went to a London suburb and later, on the balance of the records, to the country's first motel; his own deep dive follows him there.

His new company had a Dutch name as long as a mantelpiece, N.V. Continentale Tapijt en Meubelstoffen Handelmaatschappij, and an English one, the Continental Carpet and Furnishing Company. It kept the English name for half a century, through every change of business. The deep dive on the company itself traces that legal person from its 1926 incorporation to a strange afterlife as a 1970s investment vehicle.

The company reached the corner in 1928, and the address books show how it settled in. Continental Carpet took the shop at Rochussenstraat 169a¹. The 1928 address book lists H. P. Beens, its director, as living at 169b, and his elder brother, Fredericus Johannes Beens, as living at 169c and serving as procuratiehouder, the holder of the firm's power of attorney^2 3 4. Firm, director and authorised signatory were all entered under the one street number, 169, with the address suffixes a, b and c.

The brothers drew apart almost at once. On 17 January 1928 a Handelsregister notice for Continental Carpet at Rochussenstraat 169a recorded that F. J. Beens's procuratie had been withdrawn⁵, so the elder brother lost his authority to sign within weeks of the move. Then the director went too. A notice of 17 November 1931, still giving the address as Rochussenstraat 169a, named H. P. Beens of London as a new supervisory director and added, in the register's clipped shorthand, that he had been the director⁶. The household records confirm the move behind it: on 3 August 1931 Beens left Rochussenstraat 169 for Teddington, in south-west London, with his wife and two sons⁷. The man who had steered the corner's furnishing trade since 1918 had left the country, and the register filed his departure as a change of office⁸.

The notice names no successor in the director's chair and does not give the day the change took legal effect⁹. It does fix the outline. By late 1931 the shop at 169a was run by a company whose founder now watched over it from London as a supervisory director, while a man the register does not name held the director's chair. The founding family was withdrawing from the daily business, although the name stayed on the door. The file on the company follows its later turns.

The firm's stock shows best when it left the shop for a fair stand. Continental Carpet was the Dutch agent of the Belgian furniture maker De Coene, of Kortrijk¹. In February 1928 it showed De Coene's work at the W.I.M.B.A., Rotterdam's furnishing trade fair: Queen Anne, Sheraton and English-renaissance pieces, and modern office furniture besides². At the twenty-third Jaarbeurs in Utrecht, in September 1930, its stand held carpets, curtain fabrics and lampshades^3 4.

Under Beens the corner had been a home-furnishing works. Now it was a wholesale address with a Belgian agency behind it, sending carpets and curtain stuffs to the fairs where the trade did its buying. A maker's corner was turning into a seller's corner, and the company doing the selling has its own file.

For years the corner traded as Furnishco, which looks at first like a fourth business. It was the same one. Furnishco is the short, telegram-friendly form of Furnishing Company, the English half of the Continental Carpet and Furnishing Company, and it runs at Rochussenstraat 169 from a change-notice of 1927 through to a liquidation sale in 1936¹. On 6 September 1932 the Handelsregister entered Firma Furnishco as a wholesaler at Rochussenstraat 169a, dealing in upholstery, curtain and fancy fabrics, carpets, table- and divan-covers and floor coverings². The exact legal tie between the trade name and the company is not fully settled, and a note of its own keeps the question open.

No Rotterdam address book survives for the street in this stretch of the 1930s, so the best witness to the firm's unbroken tenancy is the telephone directory. Under the name Furnishco, above the Continental Carpet company, the corner answered on 30047 without a break in 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935 and 1937³. The 1932 volume prints one of the most revealing lines we have:

It gives the firm under both names at Rochussenstraat 169, on telephones 30047 and 36047, then lists the homes of two directors on the same street: H. P. Beens at no. 169 and, at no. 171, a J. A. van Duyn, who was most likely a director of the firm himself⁴. That second name comes back. By 1935 the directory had settled into one steady line, Furnishco, Fa. Meub., tapijten en stoffen, Rochussenstr. 169a on 30047:

The same five digits rang at the same door for a carpet importer, a wholesale fabric firm and, soon, a furniture house. That one number, handed on with the keys, is the clearest proof the corner offers that its real continuity was the premises and not the businesses. The deep dive on the number itself follows it down the century.

The Furnishco name ended in a clearance. On 14 July 1936 the firm advertised an algeheele uitverkoop wegens opheffing, a total closing-down sale, and on 26 September a Likwidatie Uitverkoop, a liquidation sale, both from Rochussenstraat 169⁵. It sounds like a bankruptcy but was not one: no failure was registered; the goods and the shop were simply cleared⁶. The company itself outlived the shop by forty years. In February 1976 it still existed, by then reduced to an investment vehicle, B.V. Beleggingsmaatschappij voorheen N.V. Continentale Tapijt en Meubelstoffen Handelmaatschappij, its registered name still carrying the words Continental Carpet and Furnishing Company⁷.

The corner's longest tenant was already living there. On 8 December 1931 the household of Johan Andries van Duijn moved into Rochussenstraat 169b from no. 171, down the street¹. That was seven years before any shop with the van Duyn name opened. The family lived in the building for the rest of the Furnishco years, under the same roof as the wholesale trade.

He was more than a neighbour to that trade. The 1932 telephone entry that names the two directors' homes includes J. A. van Duyn, so he was probably already a director of the Continental Carpet and Furnishing firm in 1932, though the commercial register never confirms it independently; the open question explains why it cannot yet be settled². By January 1936 the directory shows both names in the building: Furnishco at 169a and J. A. van Duyn at 169b, both on telephone 30047³.

His name comes in two spellings, and both matter. Civil and household records write van Duijn; from the later 1930s the firm printed itself van Duyn. The earliest trace of the firm name at the corner is small and private: a classified advertisement of 4 March 1938 offering a second-hand adjustable invalid chair on wheels, signed J. A. VAN DUYN, Rochussenstr. 169⁴. It names a man and an address but no business, and it does not prove that one was trading yet.

One volume catches the change from resident to firm. The 1939 address book shows the van Duyn business at Rochussenstraat 169 only in a paid display advertisement, J. A. VAN DUYN · TOONKAMERS VAN MEUBELEN TAPIJTEN EN STOFFEN · ROCHUSSENSTRAAT 169 · TELEFOON 30047, showrooms of furniture, carpets and fabrics; its plain alphabetical list, where nobody paid to appear, still enters J. A. van Duijn at 169b as a kantoorbediende, an office clerk, most likely the proprietor's household line carried over from an old occupation⁵.

The free listing cannot tell whether that clerk is the founder, then fifty-four, or his son of the same name, then twenty-seven, so the identification is left probable rather than pinned⁶. Either way, the paid entry and the plain one catch the moment a household in the building became a firm. On 7 November 1939 J. A. van Duyn advertised furniture, fabrics and carpets wholesale from Rochussenstraat 169, on telephone 30047, and invited buyers to see the showrooms⁷. The name over the door stayed van Duyn's for the next forty-eight years, as the firm's own deep dive shows.

By the end of the 1930s the shop had settled: one address, one telephone, one furnishing trade, and the third name of the decade fixed above the windows. The street outside had not. Within a few years the meadow across the corner would be dug open for a tunnel, and the quiet frontage the van Duffelen boys had laid a stone for would stand at the edge of the largest building site in the city.