Where is the narrowest house in Amsterdam?
Three houses in Amsterdam are called the narrowest, and each has a case. Singel 7 shows a wall only one metre wide, but that is the back of a wider house. Oude Hoogstraat 22 is 2.02 metres wide and tiny all the way through. Kloveniersburgwal 26, the Kleine Trippenhuis, is about 2.4 metres wide. Which one wins depends on what you measure.
Singel 7: the narrowest wall
The house at Singel 7 is known as the narrowest house in the world. The wall it is famous for is one metre wide, barely wider than its door.
It is not quite what it seems. That wall is the back of the house, and the front is a good deal wider. I amsterdam, the city’s visitor guide, admits as much: it is fairer, it says, to call this the house with the narrowest façade.
Oude Hoogstraat 22: the smallest house
On the Oude Hoogstraat, beside the Oost-Indisch Huis, stands a house 2.02 metres wide and five metres deep. Its front is built partly on top of the gateway next door, which leads to the Walloon Church.
It began as a leftover. In 1733 an older building on the spot was pulled down and a new house went up beside it, leaving about ten square metres of ground. The little house on that scrap is first recorded in 1738, and in 1742 it was let to a watchmaker, Jan Tenking, for 150 guilders a year. At first it had a ground floor and nothing else. The upper floors were added between 1768 and 1787.
Kloveniersburgwal 26: the Kleine Trippenhuis
This is the one with the story. It stands across the canal from the Trippenhuis, the palace of the Trip brothers, which at 22 metres is about nine times as wide. The tale is that the Trips’ coachman sighed that he would be happy with a house as wide as his master’s front door, and that his master overheard and had one built.
It cannot have happened that way. The Trippenhuis was finished in 1662. The little house carries the date 1696 on its sandstone front, and by then both brothers were dead. Nor is it narrow all the way back: the house is about twelve metres deep, and its rear wall is said to be almost seven metres wide.
So which is it?
If narrowest means the narrowest wall you can photograph, it is Singel 7. If it means a house that is small in every direction, it is Oude Hoogstraat 22. If you want the best story, and the pleasure of seeing the widest and one of the narrowest fronts in the city facing each other across the water, go to the Kloveniersburgwal.
The last two stand close to each other, so you do not have to choose.
Where to see it
- Trippenhuis The Trippenhuis is a double canal mansion on the Kloveniersburgwal, built from 1660 to 1662 for the brothers Louis and Hendrick Trip, who were arms dealers.
- Oost-Indisch Huis The Oost-Indisch Huis is the former Amsterdam headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, built in 1606.
- Ronde Lutherse Kerk The Ronde Lutherse Kerk, the Round Lutheran Church, is a domed former church on the Singel, built in 1668–1671 to a design by Adriaan Dortsman.
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