Hilversum is one of the older inhabited corners of the Netherlands — Bronze Age pottery from the Hilversum culture, dated 1800-1200 BCE, has been recovered from burial mounds on the surrounding heaths. But the village itself appears in writing only in 1305, when it shows up as Hilfersheem. Etymologists trace the name to Hilvertshem, houses between the hills, the soft sand ridges of the Gooi. The first bricks were laid around 900. The town was a part of Naarden until 1424, when it gained independent status. Two fires, in 1725 and 1766, burned away most of what had been built. The seventeenth-century textile and wool trade kept the village alive. Catholic families — unusual in this part of the Netherlands — gave Hilversum its slightly different demographic character, which still shows up in the dominance of St Vitus churches across the town.

In 1918, in a town whose textile industry was just starting to fade, a radio and transmitter factory called the Nederlandse Seintoestellen Fabriek opened its doors. Within two years the country's first broadcasters were renting space nearby. Within a decade, AVRO, VARA, KRO, and NCRV had built their headquarters in the leafy villa neighborhoods. Television followed radio. The first Dutch television broadcast went out from Bussum next door, but Hilversum became the long-term capital — the country's NOS, its public broadcasting umbrella, settled here, and the major studios stayed. By 1964 the town had grown to 103,000. The textile factories had all closed by then. The transition from cloth to broadcast was not a metaphor. It was a payroll, and it kept the village fed for the rest of the century.

Willem Marinus Dudok arrived in Hilversum in 1915 as Director of Public Works and stayed for the rest of his working life. He designed the town's schools, its cemeteries, its bathhouse, its pumping stations, its sports pavilions, and most famously its town hall — a 1931 building in cream brick whose tower and asymmetrical plan appear in almost every architectural textbook covering twentieth-century European modernism. The town hall almost bankrupted the municipality during a 1989-1995 restoration that cost more than anyone had budgeted. The damage is permanently visible in a Dudok Dependance exhibit inside the building. Across the town, about 75 of Dudok's buildings survive. The Multatuli School, the Snellius School, the Rembrandt School, the Fabritius School, the Bosdrift, the Geranium School, the Bathhouse — the architectural route runs through them on foot in about three hours, white signs marked Dudok pointing the way. It is one of the more concentrated walking tours of a single architect's work anywhere in Europe.

Hilversum was once nicknamed the Garden of Amsterdam. Walk a few minutes from the Kerkbrink and the city becomes heath. The Bussumerheide, Westerheide, and Zuiderheide stretch north toward Naarden, prehistoric burial mounds visible in the landscape between the conifers — three- and four-thousand-year-old graves of the Hilversum culture, the same people whose urns sit in the local museum. The Hoorneboegse Heide sits to the south, a sloping landscape shaped by the penultimate ice age 150,000 years ago. Spanderswoud, on the north side of town, has been left to its own processes since the 1980s. Connecting them all is the Natuurbrug Zanderij Crailo — over 800 meters long, the largest wildlife crossing in the world, completed in 2006 to span a motorway, a railway, a business park, a river, and a sports complex in a single uninterrupted green corridor. Bring long sleeves. Lyme-carrying ticks live where the heath meets the wood, and the warnings at the trailhead are not decorative.

The city has 660 different species of trees within its borders — the widest variety in the Netherlands — and the way the forests run into the streets is not a design accident. The botanical garden Pinetum Blijdenstein holds one of the most complete collections of conifers in the world. Above the trees fly six daily international trains from Berlin and Hanover, stopping at Hilversum's intercity station before continuing to Amsterdam. Around the trees live the Dutch celebrities whose daily lives are a national pastime. The 1973 Hilvertshof shopping center was the first in the country. Modern hip bars cluster around the Groest, the main thoroughfare for nightlife. The town went into a population dip in the 1990s — down to 80,000 in 1999 — but has been on the way back up since, attractive again to the kind of Dutch person who wants the studio jobs and the villa village both, in a town that is technically still a village, and probably always will be.