VILLUM Window Collection has recently added two large and one smaller window from China to the collection. The windows come from a small remote village in Baoding city, Hebei province, China. They are from a house built in the 1940's and the man, who lives in it today, grew up and raised a family here. In 2018 he and his wife renovated the house and changed the windows, thus giving us the opportunity to showcase the windows in the collection.
The windows are made of Elm wood and used to be finished with paper on one side. The paper is still visible on the large windows whilst it has been removed from the small window. In the 1940's China was still a poor country which meant the rural houses were built out of local natural materials like wood and stone. The shape and material use is common for the era.
The three Chinese windows are a gift from a Chinese guest, who visited the museum during spring 2019. We are very happy with the gift and proud that we now have Chinese windows in our collection. We wish for the window collection to become as international as possible and we already have windows from most of Europe, but these three windows are the first windows from a non-European country. We are also working on adding a Japanese as well as an Indian window to our collection.