The Dutch community where people live on strips of land in a lake(www.core77.com)
110 pointsby Bowes-Lyon9 hours ago10 comments
  • t0mas888 hours ago
    People don't really live there, these are holiday/recreational homes. My family owns two of those islands with a holiday home.

    Typically you use them for the weekend. My mom for example lives in a busy city and has a small garden, she uses the holiday home as a weekend getaway and a place to keep the sailing boat.

    The Netherlands are small and this area is very central, about 20 minutes drive from Amsterdam or Utrecht. So most owners use it in the same way.

    • hn_throwaway_996 hours ago
      Curious, how does it smell? Living in an old dredged peat bog sounds like smell could be a challenge.
      • spiderfarmer5 hours ago
        With standing water yes, but this is not standing water.
    • sundache7 hours ago
      You're not allowed to live there officially, but some people do.
      • t0mas887 hours ago
        Yes but those mostly live landside, there are holiday homes at the edge of the lake as well. There was a plan to allow permanent use, but I think it now changed to only allowing it for people that already live there and no new cases.
        • CalRobert7 hours ago
          Seems a shame in a housing crisis.
          • dghlsakjg5 hours ago
            The housing crisis in the west is largely not a lack of land or places to build, but an issue of building being too onerous for a variety of reasons.

            Inaccessible lake homes being allowed to be used as a primary residence will not fix it.

          • retired7 hours ago
            There is a reason for it. Infrastructure, access roads, public transit stops, build quality, utilities. The Netherlands has very high standards for homes and the direct surroundings and these homes do not meet those criteria. You would also have significantly more emissions if people started living there which would go against the emission limits for nearby nature.
          • analog317 hours ago
            Let me guess, no sewage disposal.
    • hn_submit5 hours ago
      Are they connected to the sewer system? Or do they discharge their effluence into the lake?
      • hn_throwaway_994 hours ago
        > Or do they discharge their effluence into the lake?

        Given this is the Netherlands and this appears to be a wealthy area, I'm quite sure they don't. Guessing they either have septic tanks or holding tanks that need to be pumped regularly.

    • Epa0956 hours ago
      I saw some photos with ladders from the water. Does people go swimming there, is the water clean?
      • t0mas885 hours ago
        Yes lots of people swim in both the lake and the narrow parts. The lake also has a few sand beaches that are popular in the summer. And designated swimming areas with shallow water for kids like this: https://share.google/5bko4Xpb0tzkfEChJ

        There is an app to check water quality. In general it's fine to swim in, but at high temperatures sometimes algae form. That's common in lots of these kinds of lakes in the Netherlands.

    • Onavo2 hours ago
      So this is the Dutch equivalent of a cottage?
  • DivingForGold7 hours ago
    I read these properties are actually some of the most expensive properties in The Netherlands ($ million dollar).

    But no electricity (need generator) and you cannot drive your car to your lakehouse.

    Plus, I bet the mosquitos are horrible, it is a former swamp.

    • t0mas887 hours ago
      There is electricity now, but it's quite new. Before that ours used to run on solar + batteries, you don't want a noisy generator in the middle of a nature area. A holiday home doesn't need that much electricity, warm water and heating use gas.

      Prices are typical for this side of the country.

    • sajithdilshan5 hours ago
      I was gonna say the same about the mosquitos. Also, the mosquito-borne diseases in Europe are increasing and one definitely don't wanna catch dengue fever
    • retired7 hours ago
      Easily over a million for the ones without neighbors. The most expensive one was listed for 13 million.

      These are holiday homes for wealthy elites in Amsterdam. You either go there straight from Amsterdam by helicopter or you have a chauffeur drive/boat you there. These people don’t drive themselves.

      But probably not for long with non-primary real estate being taxed at 2.2% a year.

      • gield5 hours ago
        > The most expensive one was listed for 13 million.

        This one [1]? It's a huge villa (not on an island) plus 2 islands for that price, so not really comparable.

        I found a more representative example of an island with a house that is currently for sale [2]. It is listed for €1.5 million.

        [1] https://www.quotenet.nl/vastgoed/qasteel/a62799798/joop-drec... [2] https://www.funda.nl/detail/koop/loosdrecht/huis-drecht-16/4...

        • mcv27 minutes ago
          According to the description, that second one is connected to water, electricity and sewage, so that answers that question. No need for a septic tank.
        • Scarblac4 hours ago
          Note that for the second, that's not really a house, it's a boat (woonboot). It floats. The page lists the legal requirements for any replacement boat new owners may want to put there.
        • retired4 hours ago
          Found another one at 8 million and is on an island:

          https://www.quotenet.nl/vastgoed/qasteel/a62814634/luxueus-p...

          This was in 2024 so likely valued around 9 million by now.

          The home you listed at Funda comes in at €42000 per square meter which is unheard of for The Netherlands. Not even Amsterdam Center comes close. These homes are one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the country.

  • tromp6 hours ago
    You may find this area on google maps at https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1792241,5.0288801,516m
  • calmworm3 hours ago
    Ahh, the Netherlands… strips of land through their water and strips of water through their land…
  • lefra8 hours ago
    Obnoxious cookie banner with no "reject all" button. Too bad, it sounded interesting.
    • pwg6 hours ago
      With UblockOrigin blocking all Javascript by default there was no cookie banner, just the article and photographs.
      • HelloUsername5 hours ago
        And on iOS? Which is maybe what they're using
    • clickety_clack8 hours ago
      Isn’t that actually illegal under GDPR? There’s a reason all the other sites allow you to opt out and it’s not because they want to do that.
      • dlcarrier5 hours ago
        Core77 doesn't do any business in the EU, so it probably isn't a concern. There's a few states in the US with cookie banner requirements, so it was probably designed around that.
      • flexagoon16 minutes ago
        Good luck trying to get the cookie laws enforced in any way. The Dutch DPA, for example, only lets you submit a GDPR complaint and get a response on things that directly relate to your own data. Otherwise, you can only submit a "tip-off" that they'll "review" but won't respond to.

        GDPR/ePD also requires "reject all" to be a single button, and asking the user to click a billion separate "reject" toggles is against the law, but many sites don't care.

      • CalRobert7 hours ago
        Violating gdpr is apparently legal. But even having opt out instead of opt in is in violation
      • retired7 hours ago
        Yes. But it is not enforced. The largest Dutch tech website is not GDPR compliant.
  • Deukhoofd8 hours ago
    I wonder how they're doing right now with water levels reaching critical low points.
    • t0mas887 hours ago
      Water levels in this area are tightly managed by pumps. Also in normal times they pump water in and out to keep a specific level. All of this is lower than the Amsterdamrijnkanaal, so without pumps it would flood, water doesn't naturally flow out of this place only from evaporation.
  • nsm7 hours ago
    Is this area the inspiration for the Gyptians in The Golden Compass?
  • robotnikman4 hours ago
    I wish I could live there, seems like the perfect spot.
  • AnodicElegy6 hours ago
    Looks lovely. I wonder if it has good fishing.
  • yieldcrv8 hours ago
    I googled peat so you dont have to

    Peat is a soft, spongy material made from dead plants that did not fully rot. It forms very slowly in wet, swampy places called bogs

    It is used as fuel as well as fertilizer

    • mcv21 minutes ago
      Most of Netherland used to be peat, but there's almost nothing left now. From about the 10th century onward, it's slowly all been turned into farmland or lakes. Sometimes both. This is the process that really created the country, both geographically and politically.
    • _puk7 hours ago
      It is also a fantastic carbon sink.

      https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peat-...

      "Although peatlands make up just 3 percent of land on Earth, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined."

      Nice it was historically just dug up and the leftovers turned into expensive holiday homes.

      • arjie3 hours ago
        Unfortunately the reverse is also true: polderization and exposing the peat to the air reverses that sink process. Single digit percentage of Dutch greenhouse emissions come from this. Fortunately, they are depolderizing and hopefully much of the Netherlands is given back to the sea so that environmental interests are preserved.
      • psjs6 hours ago
        If you add enough heat, pressure and (geological) time it becomes coal!
    • culi6 hours ago
      Anybody whose done any amount of gardening or has houseplants is probably familiar with peat. Though its harvest is destructive to the unique peat bog environments it forms
      • zulux6 hours ago
        There's a huge push to go peat-free, and I agree 95%.

        There are just a few uses for peat that don't have an alternative. I mention this to fellow gardeners because if you go 100% peat-free, you'll end up with an expensive disaster and, out of frustration, may go back to peat entirely.

        I think it's not productive to ignore the small corner cases where peat is almost a requirement.

        • culi3 hours ago
          Say more? I've heard coconut coir can sometimes contain salt and has less nutrients but that can be fixed by buying properly processed coir and mixing in something like finished compost. What's irreplaceable about peat?
    • al_borland7 hours ago
      It is also used to give whisky a smokey taste.
    • clickety_clack8 hours ago
      It usually holds many times its solid weight in water. If you add load to it by building something on it (without designing around the ground conditions) it can compress to a fraction of its volume, resulting in ground settlements that can be very large.
    • dlcarrier5 hours ago
      Next, google "bog butter" to see one of their more interesting uses.
    • mistrial97 hours ago
      pre-industrial peoples in some parts of the world used this material extensively.. some still do
      • yieldcrv4 hours ago
        I’ve started referring to the industrialized majority as peoples too

        “the South of Market peoples”

    • retired6 hours ago
      Can also be used to build a home. Up to 1940 that is how the lowest class in The Netherlands lived. Plaggenhutten, homes made out of peat, straw, manure.