Historical Gardens

It is official: Beeckestijn as complete estate is saved (to the left: an image of only half the territory as pictured on the 1772 estate map by architect Johann Georg Michael).
Last Thursday evening (it only took them ten minutes) the Velsen council voted in favour of plans to exchange the estate against development plots elsewhere. [...]

The ink of my previous post wasn’t even used (let alone had time to dry) when more news about restoration projects came to light. The Dutch funding institution VSBfonds reports it will invest € 3,8m in the restoration of 7 estates in The Netherlands. The estates are:

Reconstruction work in progress at Twickel, October 2007

Kasteel Horn, [...]

We have seen the announcement of two restoration projects in the last month, both in the province of Noord-Holland: Nijenburg (Heiloo) and Duinlust (Overveen).
Duinlust will see a restoration in the spirit of the design by the late nineteenth century architect Petzold, who redesigned the garden around a newly built house in the 1880’s. Current owner [...]

Always dreamt of living on an estate, surrounded by masses of designed landscape you won’t need to maintain yourself? Now’s your chance:Fürst Pückler’s Muskauer Park (Park Muzakowski) offers housing opportunities for people who don’t care about living in small houses, as long as the surrounding area offers plenty of agreable space. The park is situated [...]

In this earlier post I mentioned the design by T. Henry Reetz for the garden of Paleis Het Loo, which discovery was made public by Cascade. They also mentioned that the upper part of the garden that had not been restored in the past decades, would be restored in 2007, taking this new design as [...]

Interesting stories emerge from documents produced by the council of Velsen. Finally, the minutes of the last debates of the old council have been published in November (debates dating back to Januari and March 2006). It is fascinating to see how desparate the former council was to get Beeckestijn sold before the elections in March [...]

In recent news: Natuurmonumenten has bought Jagtlust for €6,2 million. Jagtlust is one of the many estates in ’s Graveland, but less well known because up till now it has been private property. The current owner will be living in the coach house after the sale. The house and coach house will be restricted areas, [...]

In the mean time I have been digging up some more information on the architect mentioned in my previous post: T. Henry Reetz, though it is hard to really get a grip on this architect.
He was born in France, in 1685, and probably moved to Berlin soon after. He must have had an early talent [...]