Huis met de Kogel, 16th-century wooden house in Alkmaar, Netherlands.
Huis met de Kogel is a 16th-century wooden building in the city with overhanging floors supported by brackets in the Dutch tradition. The ground floor holds shops with display windows, while the upper stories retain residential windows with the characteristic wood structural elements throughout.
This building dates to the 16th century and received a hit from a Spanish cannonball during the 1573 siege when the city came under attack. A cannonball was afterward attached to the facade as a memorial to that event.
This building is one of the few wooden houses left in the city and shows how residents once lived with simple, natural materials and crafts. It reflects the traditional ways people built and organized their homes during that era.
The building sits on a busy street and is easily accessible on foot, with the ground floor shops freely visible from the sidewalk. The structural and window details of the upper levels are well-viewed from street level, making it simple to examine the architecture closely.
The building is narrower at the bottom than at the top, a tapered shape that once saved the owner money on property taxes since fees were calculated based on ground floor width. This clever design shows how residents found practical ways to work within the tax systems of their time.
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