Qualla: Hof te Dieren

Hof te Dieren: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Willemjans, CC BY-SA 3.0. There is a shallow pit in a park near Dieren where, for almost seven centuries, a great house stood. Knights of the Teutonic Order lived there first, in a stone commandery donated by a count of Berg in 1218. Four hundred years later it became the favourite hunting lodge of the man who would one day rule England as William III. On the night of 28 December 1944, German soldiers billeted in its upper rooms lit a fire on a wooden floor because the stoves were locked. The local fire brigade refused to help. By morning the Hof te Dieren was gone, and only the depression in the grass now marks where its rooms once opened onto the gardens.

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Image: Willemjans | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hof te Dieren: The Knights' Bequest

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Apdency, CC0. Adolf VI, count of Berg, did something curious in 1218: he gave away his country house. The estate at Dieren, on the south-eastern fringe of the Veluwe, passed to the Teutonic Order, the crusading knights who would later carve out a state along the Baltic. They turned the donated...

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Image: Apdency | CC0

Hof te Dieren: A Prince Who Loved the Chase

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patomena, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1647, William II of Orange paid 147,000 florins for the old commandery. He turned it into a hunting lodge and threw himself into the woods. In the early years of his stadtholdership he sometimes spent ten weeks of the year on the Veluwe, riding out from Dieren with kennels and...

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Image: Patomena | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hof te Dieren: The Romantic Replacement

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Willemjans, CC BY-SA 3.0. A later century had different taste. The 17th-century lodge gave way to a manor in Gothic Revival style, and that house was itself modernised barely 25 years later into something more eclectic. The grounds were reimagined as an English landscape garden by Jan David Zocher and the...

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Image: Willemjans | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hof te Dieren: December 1944

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JIP, CC BY-SA 4.0. The German occupation force confiscated the house during the Second World War. On the night of 28 December 1944, with the Netherlands still half-occupied and Allied armies pressed against the Rhine, soldiers in the upper rooms lit a fire on the floor because the stoves had been l...

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Image: JIP | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hof te Dieren: A Working Estate, Open to All

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter van der Wielen, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. When the last baroness van Heeckeren van Wassenaer died in 1975, she left her estates to the Twickel Foundation, which had been established in 1953 to preserve the family's lands as nature reserve and cultural monument. The foundation still owns Hof te Dieren. Today the grounds o...

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Image: Peter van der Wielen | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl