Castle Sterkenburg, in Driebergen in the centre of The Netherlands, has received a sum of € 3.307.914,00 for several restoration projects. This is over 10% of the total sum granted for restorations this year by the Ministry for education, culture and science (OCW).
Sterkenburg, which is privately owned and currently in use as an apartment building, has retained one of its medieval features: the round tower. The rest of the current building is the result of additions from the 18th century and an all but complete rebuild in the 19th century. The restoration grants are all for the buildings on the premises: the castle itself, the gardener’s house and the coach house.
Looking at the garden we see it has the typical rectangular form of older geometrical gardens in The Netherlands. Even the structure within the outline has a very geometric setup, which is fairly unusual, because most Dutch gardens have seen major changes into the landscape style somewhere between 1760 and 1900. As the main building work has been done in the same period, one would expect to see reflexions of this building spree in the surrounding garden.
Here, the only evidence of such work (in the landscape style, at least) seems to be the asymmetrical axis placed at an angle from the house and opening up to the surrounding landscape at the end of the garden. That could be the work of the (landscape) architect Hendrik van Lunteren, to whom the 1830s remodeling of the gardens is attributed. 1H. Baas [ed], Ontgonnen Verleden. Inzoomen op de historisch-geografische ontwikkeling van het Nederlandse landschap, 2001, p102, nr 278. In the field below on the right the shadow of this dovecote in neogothic style is visible.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | H. Baas [ed], Ontgonnen Verleden. Inzoomen op de historisch-geografische ontwikkeling van het Nederlandse landschap, 2001, p102, nr 278. |
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