Huis Van Gijn Museum

Huis Van Gijn is het voormalige woonhuis van bankier en verzamelaar Simon van Gijn in Dordrecht, ingericht met 19de-eeuwse interieurs en een diverse collectie van zijn verzamelingen.

Planning your visit

Simon van Gijn was a Dordrecht banker and compulsive collector who died in 1922, leaving his house and everything in it to the city's antiquarian society. What survives is a nineteenth-century merchant's home preserved with its interiors intact — panelled rooms, painted ceilings, tiled kitchen, period wallpapers and furnishings — layered with the collections he accumulated across decades.

Those collections range widely: prints and drawings, applied arts, silver, glass, and a substantial holding of antique toys and dolls' houses, which is the section that surprises visitors and works particularly well with children. The kitchen and service areas below stairs are as complete as the reception rooms.

Dordrecht itself is the oldest city in Holland, an island town of canals, warehouses and merchants' houses that sees a fraction of the visitors Delft or Haarlem attract, and the house makes sense within it — this was the domestic world of the trade that built the place.

It is around twenty minutes by train from Rotterdam. Allow ninety minutes. The main booking is an entrance ticket. Current availability is listed below.