The colours used in this house are very surprising: turquoise in the parents' bathroom, yellowish green on the sofa in the studio, metallic bronze in the sitting-room. When the restoration of the house started, little was known about the colours because the previous occupants had painted everything yellow. However, black and white photographs from the early days of the house did suggest that a variety of colours had been used. It was quite a piece of detective work to track down the original colours of the walls, ceilings, woodwork, floors and furniture. One effective method is to use a scalpel to scrape away the paint layer by layer right back to the original coat. The result is a ladder of little boxes showing all the coats from the very first one to the present-day. More than 200 of these ladders have been made in Huis Sonneveld. However, the ladder isn't the end of it. You still don't know whether the bottom coat is the one that was actually used in the end, because it's always possible that the owners changed their minds while the painting was being done and used a different colour instead. Sometimes colours are recorded in the architects' drawings, but this is far from always being the case. However, it has usually been possible to work out the original colour using paint fragments and careful analysis and comparisons. That's why the cupboard doors in this room have been returned to their original yellow. If the weather's fine, we suggest that you go upstairs to the roof terrace.