Look at this fascinating home that belongs to hundred-year-old Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht. You can tell just by looking at it that it is so full of history and stories and memories and pieces of the world that are now long forgotten. I would love to be allowed to explore this ladies amazing space and to ask her questions about her amazing sounding life. You must must click on this link and read about her, it will be so worth your while.
– Gisèle just turned 100 years old and looks back at a fascinating life. As a child living in the USA she played with Punka-indian friends, eccentric uncles and aunts dominated everyday life at the Austrian family castle, she made numerous paint glass windows for churches, ships, and monasteries. She provided shelter to Jewish Germans during WWII, befriended great artists and writers like Max Beckmann, Adriaan Roland Holst, and Aldous Huxley. For years she lived and worked in Greece, but returned to her canal house in Amsterdam Castrum Peregrini, where she still resides today. Living the life of an artist, Gisèle is a woman of imagination. She still finds herself wondered by this world.
The patroness spends most of her time at her spacious studio at the top floor. Contently the hundred-year-old sits in a chair surrounded by her dozens of her own paintings, and a great variety of this she collected over the past century. Rocks, shells, fishbone, old tools, her father’s geology hammer.
So amazing! What a life to live!
What a fascinating site! Full of so many interesting people. Thanks for sharing.
i want her house when she is gone – thank you !!!
I’m so glad you posted this. I saw it a while back and I was thinking about it the other day and wanted to show someone, but I couldn’t remember her name.