Museum Van Loon is one canal plot with everything still on it. You can walk its whole depth in a single line: house, then formal garden, then the coach house at the far end against the back street. Adriaan Dortsman put up the front in 1671, flat sandstone with no gable and four gods along the roofline, and the house next door is its identical twin. The first tenant was the painter Ferdinand Bol, who had trained with Rembrandt and died in these rooms in 1680. The Van Loon family arrived in 1884 and never left.
Inside, the rooms were stripped and rebuilt in the French taste in 1752, with false doors added so that every wall would look symmetrical, and more than a hundred and fifty family portraits hang in them now. Walk out of the back door and the garden opens up behind the house. The box and yew are clipped to a pattern taken from a 1679 bird's-eye map of the canal belt, and a copper beech stands where the family planted it in the year they moved in. At the far end is the coach house, with the carriages still inside.