A ‘Slice of Heaven’ in Amsterdam

Herman Wouters for The New York Times

The living room on the third floor of a former factory in Amsterdam, converted into a four-story home.

AMSTERDAM — The 17th-century houses and narrow streets that line Amsterdam’s three main canals are deemed so exceptional that Unesco added the area to its World Heritage List in 2010. Many of the houses were built during Holland’s Golden Age in the 1600s; any alterations to their gabled facades are strictly forbidden.

When Janneke Heerkens, 38, a manager of Amsterdam’s Hendrikje Museum of Bags and Purses, and her husband, Sven Pinck, 40, the director of the Dutch human resources company Hollandse Peper, began looking for a building in the historic Prinsengracht neighborhood to renovate and design themselves, they sought to avoid Unesco red tape. Their search took them to a former factory in the heart of Amsterdam that had housed the old printing press for The Workers Free Press newspaper. They purchased the building, which they discovered on a property Web site, for 825,000 euros ($1.11 million) in August 2008. Once a freestanding structure with a courtyard, the four-story building was walled in on all sides by other developments and lay in disrepair.

“The building is in the middle of a tightly built block, which completely cuts it off the from the bustle of life in the city outside,” Mr. Pinck said.

After the sale was complete in 2008, the couple sought out the architects Ad Bogerman and Thomas Dill of BogermanDill to transform the old factory building into a contemporary home.

“The building had four floors which were connected via ladders and trapdoors,” Mr. Bogerman said. “It had low ceilings and small windows which let in very tiny light. Our idea was to create an open, three-story-high atrium in the heart of the building which would open up the house and flood the interior with light.”

But the task of converting the dark, lasagna-layered industrial building into a spacious, airy loft with two bedrooms was more daunting than the couple had envisioned. In this neighborhood, the facade had to remain untouched because of historic preservation codes. But the crumbling interior came close to requiring a gut renovation. “Some of the walls were just held up by plaster and the sacks of rubbish stacked against them,” Ms. Heerkens said. “At times when we were clearing everything out, I began to wonder what we’d gotten ourselves into.”

The effect of the conversion, a striking clash of old and new, could not fully be appreciated until the couple moved in in December 2009. They had paid a 175,000 euros ($237,000) in renovation costs on top of the sales price.

“We’ve taken this old printing works and written new chapters in its history,” Mr. Pinck said. “It’s also become part of our story as a family.”

Outside the building, bell-ringing bicycles and hordes of tourists noisily wander the historic canal streets. But inside, an air of serenity seems to pervade the cathedral-like space. The architects, utilizing the former factory’s open plan interior, industrial beams, heavy-duty wooden floor and exposed red brick walls, created a home spread over four levels by carving out floors and staircases and rooms where none had existed.

The entrance is on the ground floor through a pair of bright-red industrial doors. Directly ahead, a staircase of varnished honey pine from one of Amsterdam’s oldest timber importers, Van der Stad, seems to offer a tantalizing promise of natural light around a corner.

To the left of the stairs in the foyer, a pine structure made from the same wood rises up on two levels, acting as a storage and boiler room on the first floor and a bathroom and second utility room on the upstairs level .

The foyer also has a plain wooden door leading down two concrete steps to Mr. Pinck’s office. It is an austere room with bare white walls and ceramic floor tiles, in much the same industrial say as it was when it housed one of the two printing machines of The Workers Free Press, a Socialist-run newspaper. These days it is furnished with a brown leather sofa purchased at a flea market, a secondhand coffee table and a wooden desk.

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