On Slobbeland, away from the tourist waterfront, stands a private house whose facade is covered in mosaics assembled from more than eleven million cigar bands — the colourful paper rings that once wrapped individual cigars before modern packaging made them obsolete. The project took decades and turned a standard Dutch terraced house into something genuinely strange. Up close the work is dense and intricate, with repeating patterns that shift as you move along the facade.
This is still a private residence, so the viewing is from the street only. The bands were collected over many years from neighbours and tobacco shops across the Netherlands, and there is something satisfying about the logic of it: the most abundant waste material of the era transformed, with patience and care, into a permanent local landmark.