House

On the cover of ‘The symbol of death and rebirth’ (1953) you can see Beethovenlaan 11 as address for the publisher Thule. In most other cases the address is Farwerck’s Emmastraat 58. One other Thule book from the same year, also has Beethovenlaan. I also have a letter that Farwerck sent to a reader of Nehalennia on which he replaced the address Beethovenlaan by Emmastraat. More about that below. There are no issues of Nehalennia with Beethovenlaan as editorial address.

My guess was that somebody lived on Beethovenlaan 11 who cooperated with Farwerck. Years ago I wrote a text called “Who was mrs. Farwerck?” I found that name in combination with this address. Long searching made me conclude that “Mrs. Farwerck” had to be a daughter in law of Willy Farwerck. Now I find another ‘version’ of the “Mrs. Farwerck ad” which makes me doubt about that conclusion.

Some more about the school that moved in next door of the family Farwerck and eventually ate up the villa itself.

In 1912 Farwerck senior bought villa Caecilia at an auction. At least, it’s almost certain that he was the winner of the auction, otherwise he should have bought it from the winner immediately after. The address was Emmastraat 58. The family seems to have moved in in 1915. Franz Farwerck would follow in 1916.

In 1878 the second owners of the villa built stables with living facilities. This building got as address Emmastraat 60. At the other side of Caecilia, there was another villa.

A closer look into the garden house.

In 1878 Villa Caecila got permission to build a coach house with stables. I now notice that the newspaper says “with living facilities”. The main building was from 1875. Early 1875 the house was sold and in November of the same year the stables were added.

As we saw, when the family Farwerck bought the villa in 1912, they also got the stables (quite logically too). The personnel was then housed in these stables / extra house. Since I have seen the address Emmastraat 60 a few times, I was curious if the address would indeed be that house.

In my initial investigations into Emmastraat 58, the address where Farwerck lived most of his life, I had come to the temporary conclusion that the address on his obituary, Wernerlaan 41, where Johanna Farwerck-Borrius and one son lived at the time, might have been the former coach house. Looking further, this proved to be false.

Emmastraat 58 initially seems to have had a lot of ground, see the maps in the other article. Large enough for a coach house to be built in 1898. In that coach house, the family Farwerck housed its personnel and later two sons of Willy Farwerck and Johanna Farwerck-Borrius moved in. This coach house is sometimes listed as Emmastraat 58, sometimes as Emmastraat 60.

Both Franz and his brother Willy were born in Amsterdam. In 1914 a part of the family moved to the Emmastraat 58 in Hilversum. Franz only moved there in 1916 after having lived in Rotterdam for a few years. Once in Hilversum, Farwerck had lived at the Emmastraat until he died. Or so I thought!

Nowadays there is no Emmastraat 58, the house is gone.