One Door, Many Bells • Thursday Doors
For as long as anyone can remember there has been a housing shortage in the Netherlands. Even, or should I say especially, today. We’re short 80,000 affordable houses for rent, the so-called social rentals (sociale huurwoningen), primarily for young, starting families and couples.
Most of the houses behind the doors I’ve been showing were built for occupancy by one (affluent) family (and their servants). The family entrance usually consists of one, main front door. The servants’ door was usually on souterrain/basement level or a side-/back-entrance.
One way of solving this problem is to split up the 3- and 4-story houses into 3 or 4 different apartments, where each one would fit a starters-family. There are more than a few house-owners have converted their house(s) into separate apartments per floor. The front door then is the communal entrance.





So far, it makes a lot of sense. Divvy up a house into maximum of 1 apartment per floor. But take a look at the following:


One Door, Many Bells for Norm’s Thursday Doors.
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