I can still remember flawlessly how, as an eight-year-old boy, I lifted a cloth in my grandfather's yard and came face to face with the wooden wheel of something I could not identify. A "carriage," as it turned out, and I was explained that they "used to" drive around with horse-drawn carriages on wooden wheels.

With that, my fascination with the carriage was awakened and I understand what makes the Huntingbreak at Castle de Haar so special to restorer Maria Stolk. The patina, how the varnish has cracked into a beautiful structure, the perfection of the seemingly simple design, the vibrancy of the forging or the feel of the old fabric.

"Did you love it or were you in love right away?", I asked Maria Stolk after she had told me so fervently about the Hunting Break. Maria couldn't answer other than; immediately in love. When she works on the Jachtbreak it is her great love, and fortunately it is a shared love with her husband Piet and son Jean-Louis. "When I work on it, it is also my carriage and not someone else's," sounds like a mild variation on "under the spell of the ring. She gets up with it and proverbially goes to bed with it. Therefore, she simply does not talk about hours; it makes no sense, even if it makes less business sense. She does talk passionately about the hardness of old carriage varnish, unlike that on paintings, and thus the difficulty of removing it. About how she first tackles that old varnish with a "soft" solvent and then keeps trying with something stronger until the dirty layer dissolves. About how she almost forgot to take a picture when she was halfway through cleaning, to show the before-and-after effect. "Then I have no sense of time and just keep going."

"Back in the day as a very young restorer, I didn't dare to see carriages we restored back. Mainly out of fear that the restoration work might not be good enough or because you were afraid that they might not be well looked after. Now that fear has been gone for many years, because we know that our work is fine and, due to good information on our part, the carriages are usually well looked after. So now I enjoy seeing the carriages back that have been taken care of here. We also do definitely go to see them when they are in De Haar."

At restoration center Stolk, they have an ardent passion and the immeasurable respect for an authentic carriage like the Hunting Break. It could not be in better hands.

Read part 7 here

Mario Broekhuis (51), a stewardship graduate, feels completely at home at a historic country estate like De Haar. Moreover, he knows alesson of carriagesand can tell wonderful stories about it. That is why Mario gives us a monthly update on the progress of the restoration of three carriages for De Haar on this page. The three carriages in this project come from the management of Borg and Nationaal Rijtuigmuseum Nienoord and are transferred to long-term loan by Castle de Haar. This project has been made possible by VZW Pater Davids, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, VSBfonds, Stichting Bonhomme Tielens and Stichting kasteel de Haar. The Hippomobile Heritage Foundation is supervising the implementation and providing communication.