A unique meeting place in the spirit of the city
The house was built in 1686 by a tax collector from Haarlem. While the interior would have been much more austere back then, one prominent flourish it has always proudly displayed are the dolphins adorning the gable.
It would be almost 200 years before 'the house with the dolphins' received a lavish makeover by distiller Willem Hendrick Warnsinck in 1870. That's when the building as we know it today took shape with its richly painted ceilings and balcony overlooking the garden.
The Grand Salon and Golden Room were fully renovated in 2014, restoring the original 19th-century colors and replacing the heavily damaged ceiling painting with an interpretation of a 1708 painting by Abraham Bisschop based on the ancient Greek fable The Bird in Borrowed Feathers.
