¹⁶The House That Researches Itself

This site has had a narrator it kept off the page. The building has been read here at arm's length, as a document, but the people reading it live inside it. Giulio C. and his partner have held the ground-floor dwelling since 1 July 2019¹, and they wrote this site. The narrator was us, and in this closing chapter the research turns around to look at the people doing it.

In August 2026 Giulio C., the present owner, bought a small painting. It is an original watercolour by Gerrit van Duffelen, who as a nine-year-old laid the building's first stone in 1899, together with six-year-old Cees Pelt², and was by then grown up and working as a painter. De Rijn vanaf de Grebbeberg, the Rhine seen from the Grebbeberg, measures thirty-two and a half by fifty and a half centimetres and is signed at the lower right. It came from a country-estate collection, that of the de Beaufort-Clifford Kocq van Breugel family of Buitenplaats Bornia at Driebergen³. How it got there can no longer be traced⁴. No tie between the painter and that house has come to light, the picture shows the Nederrijn some twenty kilometres away rather than Rotterdam, and the estate's own papers were lost in the war⁵.

The other works his family still holds, photographed in 2026, are in the family collection. The whole span, from the dyke the street still follows to the watercolour on the wall, runs in order through the timeline.

Some of this work could not have been done in any archive, because it depended on people who are still alive. In 2026 descendants of both founding families answered letters. A hard rule covers that part of the research. This is a public page about living people, so no living contributor is named here. Nothing supplied privately is reproduced unless a recorded permission covers that exact name and item, and no birth dates, places or ways to reach anyone appear at all.

On the van Duffelen side, a granddaughter of the painter holds several of his paintings and etchings, and his own artist's palette, which was bought separately on the market. In August 2026 she photographed the palette beside two of his oils and sent the picture for this research. Those works, gathered and credited with her permission, are the ones in the family collection mentioned above.

The Pelt side sent the only photograph the project holds of the founder, Cornelis Pelt. It is a family group, not a portrait. In the picture, most likely made in 1899, the year the works began, Cornelis is at the top right with his wife Jacoba Anna Muijser and their eight children around them; one of the two boys in sailor suits is Cees, who at the age of six had laid the building's first stone, with Gerrit van Duffelen, that same year^1 2.

His descendants can be traced toward a living generation, though unevenly: the early links are in the civil registers and the late one is not. Cornelis Pelt's son was Cees Pelt, and that link is documented.

Willemien Pelt, who died in 2022, was made Ridder in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau in the 1998 honours for her work in Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk governance³, and she married into the Eland family. Without recorded consent, the living descendants after her go unnamed here and appear only as her family. The Pelt line to the living generation draws that line as far as it can honestly be drawn, and the relationships register sets out, row by row, the family ties and firm successions from Van Duffelen & Pelt through Beens to van Duyn.

For one moment the works can be seen at work. At the end of 1906 a trade weekly toured the corner, and in January 1907 it printed photographs of the workshops: the machine-woodworking shop, the furniture workshop where about twenty men worked at their benches, and the upholstery shop. A single 13-horsepower gas engine drove all the tools¹. Inside the works follows that visit page by page. It is our fullest view of the works. No document yet read shows the plant in the years after it, under Beens or van Duyn, or gives the formal account a powered workshop leaves behind: the permit, the list of machines, the plan of each floor. The site ends on that gap.

Part of the answer is a clean absence. Rotterdam's statutory nuisance-permit notices, the Hinderwet announcements a powered workshop had to publish, are thick on the ground for the Rochussenstraat in the digitised press: numbers 14, 49 and 51, 78 for the Unilever plant and its fifteen electric motors, 107 for Breedveld's furniture factory. A systematic search found nothing for number 169, under any of its firms². Because the notices are plainly indexed for the same street and years, the silence tells us something, though poor print and partial coverage keep it short of proof.

The rest lies in an archive that has been found but stays shut. The Hinderwet series that would hold any nuisance-permit file for the corner survives in the Stadsarchief Rotterdam, in two separate runs with a gap between them that no series fills. No entry for no. 169 has been read from it, so whether a file was ever filed is still unverified. The founding firm's own years, from the works' opening in 1901 to 1917, fall inside the earlier run, where such a file, if it exists, would be waiting. The Beens and van Duyn years after 1918 fall in the gap, a stretch of the record the archive never kept. What survives is neither scanned nor indexed online, and can be seen only in the reading room³. A file of this kind, where it survives, is the sort that carries a machine inventory, a workshop plan and the neighbours' objections: the formal counterpart to what the 1907 visitors saw.

The Hinderwet open question sets out what that unread file might still add, and the research ledger places it among everything still unresolved.

Here the story stops and the apparatus begins. From this point the Archive gathers everything named across these four eras, every source, picture, person and open thread, with the Methodology beside it to show how each line was found, checked and written.