Anton Pieck was a Dutch illustrator, born in 1895, who never planned to design a theme park. He was working as a book illustrator and watercolourist when, in 1951, the mayor of the village of Kaatsheuvel approached him about a new sprookjesbos — a fairy-tale forest — that the village wanted to build. The mayor was a man named R. J. M. van der Heijden, and he had an idea that an existing children's playground on the edge of the village should grow into something more memorable. He had read Pieck's illustrated edition of the Brothers Grimm tales and decided that Pieck was the only person who could draw the buildings he wanted built.
Pieck agreed. He set three conditions. The buildings had to be drawn before they were built. He had final approval on every painted surface. And no straight line was permitted anywhere in the park. The Kaatsheuvel committee accepted all three conditions on the spot. The fairy-tale forest opened in 1952 with seven tableaux, all designed by Pieck. The park has grown around them for the seventy-four years since.
What Pieck actually drew
Pieck's original watercolours for the park's buildings are kept in a climate-controlled vault at the Efteling design office. The vault is not open to visitors. The originals are, however, occasionally lent for exhibition; the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch had a complete Pieck-Efteling exhibition in 2017 that ran for nine months and was, by the museum's own account, the best-attended show in their history.
What Pieck drew, mostly, were rooflines and gables. The buildings of the fairy-tale forest are unusual because Pieck specified that no roof should be plumb. Every gable leans a degree or two. Every chimney is slightly out of square. The carved beam-ends are shaped as bears, monks, or sleeping children, never as straight rectangles. The rule against straight lines, which began as a half-joke at that first meeting in 1951, became the structural law of the park's architecture. It is still in force.
The rule against straight lines began as a half-joke and became the structural law of the park.
The line he didn't draw
Pieck died in 1987 at the age of 92. By the time he died, he had personally designed about 90 of the buildings, vehicles, and tableaux in the park. His successor was the in-house design team that he had trained over the preceding two decades. They work to a style guide that is part document, part oral tradition. The document specifies brush sizes, lead pigments, and roof angles. The oral tradition specifies things like which carved bear-end is a Pieck and which is from a 1992 expansion. (To the trained eye the difference is clear; to the visitor it is invisible. Pieck would have considered this a success.)
The line he didn't draw — and which the design team has continued to honour — is the line of the modern roller coaster. The Baron 1898 ride, opened in 2015, sits in a section called Ruigrijk that is allowed to look industrial: rusted iron, exposed bolts, scaffolding. This zone is the antithesis of the Pieck idiom, and is intentionally so. The architecture there reads as "before Pieck got to it", which is its own kind of homage. The fairy-tale forest, sitting half a kilometre away in Marerijk, remains entirely Pieck. The contrast is the park's design grammar.
What survives
Pieck's original 1952 buildings — the Sleeping Beauty pavilion, the Frog King pond, the gingerbread house of Hansel and Gretel — are still on their original foundations. They have been re-roofed three times, repainted at least nine, and structurally reinforced for fire and earthquake codes that did not exist when Pieck drew them. But the visible shapes are the same shapes he drew. Standing on the path between the Wolf and the Seven Goats and the Pinocchio scene, you are looking at, almost exactly, the watercolour Pieck completed in October 1951.
This is, in the end, the rare case in theme-park architecture: the founder's vision is still the visible shape of the place. The park has grown, the rides have been modernised, the queues are now managed by an app. But the buildings he drew are still the buildings you walk past.