The Noldes bought the warft in 1926 — one of the man-made mounds the Frisian marsh has always used to sit above a sea that arrives without asking. On it they put something that answered nothing local: a two-storey brick cube with a single-storey extension and a triangular footprint, flat-roofed, lit from skylights, built between 1927 and 1928 to Nolde's own ideas with the architect Georg Rieve. The neighbouring farmhouses were low and thatched; this was not. Between 1934 and 1937 he added a painting gallery. The couple moved in for good in 1930, and Nolde worked in the ground-floor studio that visitors now walk through as part of the exhibition. House and garden have been protected monuments since 1996.

Nolde designed the garden himself, in the spirit of the reform movement that set itself against industrial and standardised taste. It reads as a cottage garden, enclosed and domestic, though it breaks the rule of its type: there is no central axis binding it to the house, and building and planting stand as separate works. There is a pond. There is a thatched garden house he called Seebüllchen. At the end of it is the crypt where he and Ada are buried, its front wall carrying a mosaic Madonna and Child of his own making. His gardener, Thomas Börnsen, tended the beds until 1976 and left behind a planting plan, which is why the colours that fed the watercolours still come up every summer in roughly the order he wanted them.

Nolde took Danish citizenship after the 1920 border plebiscite, then joined the Nazi movement on the Danish side of the line — the Nationalsozialistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Nordschleswig in 1934, absorbed the following year into NSDAP-Nordschleswig. His antisemitism was not incidental to this. He wrote that Jews had much intelligence and spirituality but "little soul and little creative capacity." In the summer of 1933 he drafted what he called an Entjudungsplan, a scheme for expelling Jews from the Reich. That May he had denounced the painter Max Pechstein to the propaganda ministry as a Jew, and when Pechstein corrected the record, Nolde would not withdraw it. None of this protected him. The regime pulled 1,052 of his works out of German museums, more than it took from any other artist, and hung two in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition. On 23 August 1941 the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts notified him that he lacked the "reliability and suitability" for the profession, and barred him from artistic work of any kind.

Under the ban he painted small and in private, hundreds of watercolours on Japanese paper that he later called the Unpainted Pictures. The title did most of the work. As West German museums rehabilitated expressionism after 1945, the version that took hold was of a great artist silenced by the Nazis and defying them in secret, and Siegfried Lenz fixed it in the national imagination with Deutschstunde in 1968 — a novel built around a painter unmistakably modelled on Nolde, filmed for television in 1971 and for cinema in 2019. Nolde helped the story along. He cut the harshest antisemitic passages from postwar editions of his memoirs, which stayed in that trimmed form until 2008. At his denazification hearing in 1946 he declared a maximum income well below what his own tax records showed, and was classified as not implicated.

The correction came from inside the house. Drawing on the foundation's own archive, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin showed "Emil Nolde — A German Legend: The Artist under National Socialism" from 12 April to 15 September 2019, and its director, Felix Krämer, said plainly that Nolde's paintings in the Chancellery had been "not a good choice." The foundation's own director, Christian Ring, committed Seebüll to presenting Nolde free of myth and legend, with all the contradictions left in. The museum has kept working around that. Five makeshift buildings put up after Nolde's death were demolished after 2004 and replaced by a forum holding documents from his life, a Kontor with the library and offices, and a low glasshouse selling plants and seed raised on site. In 2022 the collector Hermann Gerlinger gave the museum 36 Noldes, a Karl Schmidt-Rottluff watercolour, and the correspondence between the two painters. The house reopened that August after a long renovation, and opens daily from 1 March to 31 October.