The House in the Wood is a palace within a nearly two-mile-long park near The Hague, sometimes used as a royal residence. Its elegant interiors and richly preserved grounds make it more than a landmark on the boys’ approach to the city: the surrounding wood is portrayed as a place protected across generations, even amid war and financial crisis.

Setting and Approach

As the skating party nears The Hague, Lambert van Mounen proposes leaving the ice and entering the city through the Bosch. The group agrees, takes off its skates, and continues on foot. The route brings the travelers into a landscape distinct from the frozen waterways that have carried them most of the way: a grand park and wood, nearly two miles in length, containing the House in the Wood.

Palace and Interior

Plain in its exterior, the palace is described as elegant within. Its rooms are finely frescoed, with designs painted directly onto plaster while it was fresh, and some are hung with beautifully embroidered Chinese silks. One room contains family portraits, including a group of royal children painted repeatedly by the Dutch artist Van Dyck, court painter to their father, Charles the First of England. The narrator notes that the children were later orphaned by the axe—a pointed reminder that beauty and royal status did not shield them from the violence of history.

The Protected Wood

The grounds are especially charming in summer, when flowers and birds brighten the park. Magnificent oaks rise in long rows, and their freedom from cutting gives the wood a character the narrator describes as almost sacred. Children are not permitted to meddle with even a twig, and the woodman’s axe has never sounded there. The trees’ protection is rendered through this contrast with ordinary treatment of woodland: elsewhere, birds report, trees are cropped and shaped, while here the oaks grow unclipped, spreading foliage over lawns and pathways and reflecting in sunny ponds.

Preservation and Significance

The wood’s protection has endured through sharply different pressures. Even while Philip of Spain ordered Dutchmen to be killed by the hundreds, he issued a mandate that no bough of the beautiful wood be touched. Later, when the State considered sacrificing the park to help replenish an almost exhausted treasury, the people raised the required sum themselves rather than allow it to be lost. The House in the Wood thus belongs to a setting whose beauty is not merely ornamental: its continued existence reflects a shared resolve to preserve a place regarded as precious, even when public need might have justified its destruction.