As its name suggests, oude stallen means "old stables", this shopping complex did not begin life as a place of retail or restaurants. It began as what the village needed, in the late 1890s: somewhere to keep horses.

From Working Stables to Village Gathering Place

The oldest part of the Oude Stallen complex is the double-volume building on the right as you enter, a structure that still reads, in its proportions and its materials, as something built for animals rather than people. The scale of the space, the solidity of the walls, the way it opens upward: these are the characteristics of a working farm building, not a commercial one.

Over the decades the stables were adapted and expanded, eventually becoming the courtyard complex that exists today. The transformation is a good example of what thoughtful adaptive reuse looks like: old bones, new purpose, the character of the original preserved rather than erased.

Today

Among the details that make Oude Stallen worth exploring is the water trough, retained between the two courtyards. It is a small thing, easy to walk past, but it is one of the most direct connections to the building's original function. A reminder that horses once drank here and that the Huguenot Road outside once rang with hooves rather than the engines of wine-country visitors.