Restaurant De Kas, former municipal nursery greenhouse (Frankendael Park)

The glasshouse complex in Frankendael Park was raised for Amsterdam's municipal nursery, where the plants for the city's plantings were grown. The sources do not agree on the date. The Arcam architecture centre places construction in 1926; the restaurant's website speaks of a large greenhouse built in 1927 to supply the city's other parks with trees, grasses and exotic plants, palms included; the Dutch Wikipedia article on Frankendael, for its part, reports that the municipality moved the Stadskwekerij, founded in 1885, to this park in 1930, which leaves the exact chronology uncertain.

At the end of the twentieth century demand fell and the greenhouses became obsolete. According to Arcam they were due for demolition when the park was redeveloped, around 2000, until a plan for an organic restaurant changed their fate. Judged too dilapidated for simple conversion, the complex was, says Arcam, taken down and rebuilt in its exact form, with its original steel structure restored and reused; other sources speak rather of a renovation and conversion of the existing building. The restaurant's site places the conversion in 2000 and the business 'since 2001'. Arcam credits the architecture to Buro Sant en Co and Piet Boon, the latter having designed the interior, and the landscaping to Edwin Santhagens. A 2001 photograph by the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency, published on Wikimedia Commons, already shows 'the greenhouse in which the restaurant is housed', with its chimney.

The building remains a horticultural glasshouse complex: several glass-roofed volumes, mostly gabled, of differing heights (3.8 to 6.6 m according to the OpenStreetMap community's mapping), gathered around an old brick chimney that reaches 22.5 m on the same map. Arcam stresses that the original steel structure, restored, is still part of the restaurant and that the greenhouses were rebuilt in their exact form. The glazed walls and roofs let in the light of the sky: the official website promises dinner in the middle of a greenhouse, 'under the starry sky', and a third-party page describes diners seated between glass walls.

Piet Boon designed the interior and Edwin Santhagens the surrounding landscape; the adjoining kitchen garden, grown by the restaurant, borders the greenhouse. OpenStreetMap lists the restaurant as wheelchair accessible. The glass covering is attested by the descriptions on the sites cited and by the photographs of 2001.

In this greenhouse, production comes before decoration. The restaurant says it grows around 300 varieties of vegetables, herbs and fruit, under glass and in open ground; it keeps two gardens, one in Amsterdam and one in the Beemster. Harvesting is done at the last moment: the site's motto sums it up in one line, picked in the morning, on the plate in the afternoon. A page on facet-accountants.nl notes that guests can see all kinds of crops growing, some 300 kinds of vegetables, fruit, edible flowers and herbs grown in the gardens and greenhouses; an article on Gardenista says the greenhouses and the herb garden supply herbs and edible flowers, and that several mature trees stand inside the dining room.

The sources detail neither the species grown inside the building nor the respective shares of greenhouse and garden. The menu follows the seasons, and that rhythm stands in for a calendar of collections.

The greenhouse is visited as a restaurant: one enters by booking a lunch or a dinner, which gives the length of a meal to look at the framework, the glass and the plants. It stands in Amsterdam-Oost, on the edge of Frankendael Park, a former private estate turned public park whose historic gardens have been restored and where excavations in 2008 may have found the foundations of the old orangery, according to the Dutch Wikipedia. The outing can continue to the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam, whose glasshouses are already in the catalogue, about two kilometres to the north-west. The photographs of the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE) on Wikimedia Commons show the complex as it was in 2001.