Heveadorp, the remnants of social entrepreneurship

At present only a small portion of the old factory village survives. What remains is now protected. The factory village Heveadorp only pays lip service to the garden village in the architecture, the layout is a formal grid of three connected parallel streets.

The architecture is romantic in nature and refers to the good life in the countryside. The houses have been inspired by English Arts and Crafts architecture and is basically vernacular. Great attention was paid to provide a varied exterior and roofline to counteract the formal placement along the narrow streets.

Two rows of terraced cottages with large dormers and lunette-vaulted gable ends. The terraces have been designed as a single entity with no clear demarcation of the separate houses within each building. In the background a row of post-war terraced housing, in  the typical bland style of the 1980s.

The romantic English reference is achieved by the use of high chimneystacks. Vernacular Dutch chimneys are much lower and are never structural (never carrying the central roof beam).Here the chimneys are mostly ornamental and separate from the roof construction. The double cottage on the right has a plaque with "Borneo". Each of the 4 blocks of terraced cottages was named after one of the Indonesian islands where rubber was (and still is) produced.

The Middellaan (Middle Lane) forms the central axis of the factory village of Heveadorp. It follows an older dirt road that lead down to the Rhine where a ford was located just after the confluence of the Seelbeek brooke with that large river. The formal placement of the housing is clear as they are all built on the same building line along the narrow street.

One of the typically Dutch additions to the "English cottages" are these decorative awnings over the front door (shown left). The red ridge tiles are typical also for thatched cottages in the Netherlands. They make the roof more durable and also serve a decorative purpose here as the emphasize the outline of the variable roof shape. 

There are only three types of houses in Heveadorp. This is a terraced type with the front doors in a recessed entrance emphasised by a triangular gable end overhead. Originally these cottages stood on the street. The green was created in 1985 when a new road was built lower on the slope.

The executive cottages and villas have been built in a similar vernacular style as the workers cottages. Some are still standing on the south side of the former rubber factory site.

An example of 1950s and 1960s architecture. These terraces were built next to the old factory village to provide roomier accommodation and replace some of the war-damaged cottages. These sections of Heveadorp have not been given conservation status.