Today I visited the Louwman car museum in the Hague, the Netherlands.
This museum is a privately owned by Mr. Louwman, who, amongst others is the owner of the Toyata/Lexus import and dealer network in the Netherlands.
Mr. Louwman has been collecting cars just about all his life. Until a few years ago his museum was in Raamsdonkveer in the South of the Netherlands. In those year we lived pretty close by. I knew his old museum pretty well. I've organized several classic car rallies in which we used it either as starting point or as final destination. Had a nice restaurant and we got free access to the museum for all our members.
Anyway about 5-6 years ago, Louwman announced he wanted a purpose built museum for his ever expanding collection. His old museum became way to small. So he choose The Hague. As chance would have it, we again lived closed by. However, we moved abroad more then five years ago, and the museum only opened a few years ago. So I had never the opportunity. I'm currently staying in the Netherlands in our home nearby the Hague. Today, together with a good friend of mine we visited the museum.
I have visited most car museums in Europe and a few in other places of the world. I must admit this is probably one of the best. Beautiful purpose built building. A truly eclectic collection of cars, bikes and endless amounts of all sort of car paraphernalia/
The cars are displayed magnificently. Every car has a plague with details on the car in both Dutch and English. The displays are distributed over three different floors. There are cars from just about all periods, starting from the very early, near coach type cars, till modern times. From just about all manufactures around the world.
Towards the exit you will find yourself wondering in a replica little street with various period shops! Very nice.
Have a look here for some more information :
http://www.louwmanmuseum.nl/?sc_lang=en
I have taken some pictures with my phone, which doesn't do the museum or the collection any justice. But you'll get a good impression, I hope.
One of the very interesting artifacts on display was this odd shaped level you see in one of the pictures below. It is actually a brake tester. The idea was to mount it on the dashboard, drive the car at a certain speed and if the bubble moved forward enough your brakes were fine.
So, if you ever happen to find yourself in the Netherlands and get bored looking at windmills, dykes, tulips, cheese or silly Dutch wearing clogs, drive to The Hague and visit this museum.
Enjoy!
Jeroen