Offices in the city
We have already described the office mania of the 1970s in several articles. These two buildings also came about because the city government had planned more offices in the city centre, and demolishing houses to get there was not shied away from. The office villas were designed by Frans van Gool and completed in 1979. They replaced two villas built more than 100 years earlier on behalf of a spice merchant, Adrianus Martinus Lodewijk. He lived at Weteringschans 28, his daughter at number 26. By the end of the sixties the family had long since ceased to own the buildings on the Singelgracht; they fell into disuse and later into disrepair. In 1967 the villas Groot Banda and Banda Neira were demolished.
Pepper and Salt
Van Gool designed his buildings in line with the city council's wish not to put up a standard office block, but to go for office villas instead. The buildings, which were the same size as Lodewijk's villas, soon acquired the nickname Peper en Zout (Pepper and Salt) because they look like a pair of salt and pepper shakers. Even during construction there was plenty of criticism of the design, which does differ considerably from the buildings around it. The architect stressed that this was exactly his intention with the design: an identity of its own that "talks to the buildings across the water". Van Gool later designed housing in Osdorp and Amsterdam-Noord, among other places. He died in 2015.
Booking.com
At the end of the 1990s Bookings.nl was admittedly still in its infancy, but it was outgrowing its little office in Diemen. Founder Geert-Jan Bruinsma went looking for an office near his home in De Pijp and eventually came across a vacant fourth floor in the building on the Weteringschans. From this spot the company grew into the multinational it is today under the name Booking.com, and around the end of the first decade of this century Van Gool's creation finally became too small. Today Peper en Zout offer space to all kinds of companies.
