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Berlageboerderij Landgoed De Schipborg

At De Schipborg near Anloo in Drenthe, H.P. Berlage designed a farmstead and residence for the Kröller-Müller family around 1914. The complex was conceived as part of the family’s ambition to create a modern and largely self-sufficient estate.

Unlike Berlage’s major urban projects, De Schipborg demonstrates his approach to architecture in a rural landscape. The buildings are organised as a coherent ensemble around a central courtyard, bringing together residential and agricultural functions.

The architecture is restrained and robust. Brick is the dominant material, while the carefully controlled proportions, repetitive openings and geometric organisation reveal Berlage’s rationalist principles. Rather than treating the buildings as isolated objects, he designed them in relation to each other and to the surrounding landscape.

The project reflects Berlage’s broader belief that architecture should respond to use, construction and environment. The farm was not simply a functional agricultural building, but part of a carefully planned living and working landscape.

De Schipborg therefore provides an important insight into a less familiar aspect of Berlage’s oeuvre. It demonstrates how his rationalist ideas could be translated into a rural context, where architecture, agriculture and landscape form a single spatial system.

The estate remains a distinctive example of Berlage’s work outside the major urban centres of the Netherlands.