Restaurant, Leiderdorp

Nearly a century later, slow food, as we would now call the feed De Graaf gave to his cows, is back in fashion – not for economic reasons but for more idealistic, eco-educational ones. How many urbanites still know what purslane is, or how cheese is made, or when red currants are in season? And who still knows what milk fresh from the cow tastes like?

Kingma Roorda architecten converted Zijlstroom into a restaurant/cooking studio that operates under the motto 'to eat is to know'. Meals here are put together from seasonal, regional products and fresh fruit and vegetables from the orchard, vegetable garden and greenhouse on the estate. In the same way, the architecture tries restore some sense of the relation between the factory and the long-demolished cowsheds and to continue the story of Zijlstroom. In restoring the factory the architects retained characteristic details like the hoisting winch and put others to a new use – the old meal hopper is now part of the rainwater drainage. At the rear, a new annex clad in corrugated aluminium makes an industrial, no-nonsense impression, while the shape of the roof with overhang is a clear reference to a barn.