The local contractor De Best built a villa in Katwijk aan Zee in 1901. De Best rented the house to the painter Gerhard Munthe, who named the building after his little daughter Sigrid. In 1909 the Munthes departed and the building was bought by the Rotterdam tea trader J.E.R. Trousselot, who in 1916 decided to give this villa a different appearance. For this renovation he asked his neighbour, the painter Menso Kamerlingh Onnes, whose villa he greatly admired, for advice. Kamerlingh Onnes made a number of sketches, inspired by the Tunisian architecture he had become familiar with on his travels. Since he was not an architect, he enlisted the help of a friend of his son Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, the architect J.J.P. Oud. The ideas of Menso Kamerlingh Onnes and of Oud converged in a design in which an interplay of cubic elements of varying heights formed a whole. They altered the dimensions of the windows and eliminated the shutters. They demolished the wooden veranda at the rear façade and replaced it with a loggia with thick columns. A loggia was also added to the front façade. Next to the main building they constructed a tower-like structure. North African architecture, with its simple cube-like forms and lack of ornamentation, proved a good path for the architects who strove for simplicity and renewal.
