Build in progress: The Stewards office, walls and a fireplace.

Hello my dear friends. Thank you for your lovely comments on my last post. From Lady Zonneschut's dressingroom upstairs we now go downstairs into the cellars of the house, the domain of the servants. 

Today I want to share some progress on the Rentmeesterskamer (Stewards room). It will be the grandest of the downstairs rooms. But it will still be quite modest in respect to the upstairs rooms. As you can see in the picture below, made of the cardboard model of the house, I had originally planned a wooden skirting board with a dado rail to emphasise its higher status.  But with the floor level being flush with the water level of the moat, the rising damp would eat away the wooden panels. (great challenge for aging though!) So It will be a mopboard or skirting of tiles only. And I dropped the blue on the picture below and opted for brick red for tbe wood. 

By the way... Some of you asked me what a rentmeester or steward was. Everybody knows the butler, the head of a Victorian household. And, if the "whodunits' are to be believed, the favourite suspect of every detective in a murder inquiry. The steward was, since the early middle ages, in charge of the whole estate in the absence of the owner. Originally that included the household as well. But those two roles got separated into different positions and thus the butler appeared on stage. In the Netherlands of around 1800 a butler in the English sense was not common at all. That role was often performed by the housekeeper in a sense of assisting the lady of the house. 

Rijksmuseum: The Tenant Farmer's Rent, Quiringh van Brekelenkam 1660-1668

The estate however was, besides the house and its park, largely an agricultural enterprise with tenant farmers and perhaps even wind and watermills. There tenants and other farmers could mill their grains at the cost of a fee, et cetera. The estate could have waterways with locks and bridges, and roads where toll had to be paid. Those tolls, fees and rents formed an income for the landlord. Other income would be generated through exclusieve hunting and fishing rights that the landowner held on the waterways and fields/woodlands in and around the estate. And someone had to keep the accounts, check the state of these roads and waterways and make sure that everybody on the estate did and paid what was due. And last but not least, someone to make sure that the country manor house and gardens are well maintained while the owner lived in the town during the winter months. That was in short the job of the rentmeester (steward).

So this room is basically an office. It will hold the records and the treasure chest of the estate. This is also the only room tenants will ever get to see in the house. And that probably only on the days that the rents are due. So de décor must show that the steward is not someone to be trifled with. It must be sufficiently grand to impress tenants, suppliers and supplicants. But not too grand in order for the steward to forget his own place in the social hierarchy. 

Well, enough chit-chat. Time to go back to the build. I have given all the pieces a basecoat of primer to seal of the MDF from moist. It should now be sufficiently protected against moisture. With spacers I have built up the thickness of the walls where I need it. The thick spacers also reinforce the walls. The spacers are also used  to hold the floor, walls and ceiling together. The floors and beams/ceiling decorations will be added later. 

With all the parts of the box assembled and fitted together it is time to direct my attention to the décor. 

Windowseats need to be added into the arched opnenings. This roombox will be envelopped by an out box or cabinet with the windows set into them. Basically the walls you see here  are half the thickness of the final walls. 

Up and into the renaissance windowseats were often literally built in the wall. This picture above is from castle Nijenrode in the province of Utrecht. In 1675 the year Huis ter Swinnendael was built this type was already old fashioned but stil used in the downstairs rooms. 

As you can see I have build them up out of pieces of mdf and remnants of the spacers used to build up the walls. The floors of these windowseats will be tiled with the same tiles as the floor. For the seats I cut off bits of red ceder and glued them into place. 

To finish the off I stained them with a light oak stain. I want to distress them but keep that for after the move to our new house. 

Now it was time to direct my attention to the fireplace. 

The fireplace and chimneybreast are an early 17^th century type. It will be free hanging from the wall without collumns or corbels as a support. The chimneybrest will have a simple panneled division. The open hearth underneath will be backed by blue Delft tiles. Two tableaux depicting prince Maurits of Orange and prince Hendrik Friso of Orange. They will be seperated by a few rows of black tiles in the middle. The mantleshelf will be a piece of a thick oak picture frame I found for 50 cents at a charity shop that I have sawn in half. 

The other half is destined to become the the top of a 17^th century linnen cabinet. A ‘Kussenkast’ of which you can see a fine example in the picture below. Literally translated this cabinet is called a “Pillowcabinet”. Not that it was built to keep pillows in, but the rectangular protruding decorations on the doors resembled pillows in the eyes of the 17^th dutch. :-) Something similar to this will be one of my future projects to reuse the left over part of the frame.

But  back to the fireplace. On the middle panel of the chimneybreast is room for a picture. Here it will be a print of the allegory of abundance holding a cornucopia. A discrete reminder to the steward of what his lord and master expects from him. The accumulation of wealth for the family who lives upstairs in the summer months. :-)

The mantleshelf and chimneybreast are painted with rustoleum chalkpaint for furniture. The colour is called brick red. This will be the colour for all wooden parts like the fireplace, the ceilingbeams, the door and the windows. 

And now comes the tricky bit. There will be some decorations and I want them to be painted as grisailles. I have never done this before and find this very daunting. But, nothing wagered nothing won! But that is for a next post. 

Underneath the chimney breast, the back wall of the hearth will be decorated with Delft tiles. I ordered porcelain tiles from Kruger tiles on Etsy and carbon from a pencil and a sharp pen to copy the outlines of the two princes on the tableaux that I sticked on a large tile. I hope to soon be able to ink them and paint them, amd have them fired in a pottery kiln.

But that’s it for now my friends. I will show you that in next episode.

Huibrecht