The building's grand name — *Princessehof*, literally 'Princess's Court' — dates to 1731, when Marie Louise of Hesse-Kassel bought the 1693 mansion and moved in. Marie Louise had been widowed in 1711 and had spent the next two decades acting as regent for her young son, William IV of Orange. When he came of age in 1731 and the political work ended, she stepped back into private life in Leeuwarden, where she was known affectionately as *Marijke Meu* — 'Aunt Mary' in the local dialect. She began collecting ceramics for her household, and the pieces she gathered now sit at the heart of the museum's holdings. They are best seen in the Nassaukamer, a Baroque dining room preserved as a period interior, where Marie Louise's table is set as if she might walk back in.

After Marie Louise died, the Princessehof was carved into three separate houses, the way old aristocratic shells often are when their original purpose dissolves. In one of those three houses, the middle one, the engineer Georg Escher and his wife Sara raised a family. On 17 June 1898, their fifth son was born in this house — Maurits Cornelis, who would sign his prints simply M.C. Escher. The mathematically impossible woodcuts, the hands drawing themselves, the staircases that climb to their own beginnings — all of that came from a child who first opened his eyes inside a building that had already been princess's court, regent's parlor, and triple-divided private home. The Princessehof's habit of being many things at once may not have left him entirely unimpressed.

By the early twentieth century, one of the three subdivided houses had passed to Nanne Ottema, a Leeuwarden notary, and his wife Grietje Kingma. The Ottemas were obsessive collectors of Asian ceramics, and in 1917 they founded a museum inside their own home — the founding act that gives Princessehof its public life today. The Ottema-Kingma Stichting, the foundation that bears their names, still formally owns the Asian collection, which now ranges from pieces dated as early as 2800 BC through the twentieth century. Around that core, the museum has built up European holdings — Delftware, painted tiles, porcelain panels mounted on mantelpieces — and a respectable Islamic ceramics collection, plus a permanent reconstruction of the studio of the Dutch ceramist Jan van der Vaart.

The 2023 break-in was the second attempt in two weeks; the first had been thwarted. The second succeeded long enough for the thieves to leave the building with eleven objects, though seven of them did not survive their own escape. Museums like Princessehof live with the knowledge that what they hold is portable in the worst sense — a Chinese export plate from the seventeenth century has been moving across the planet, hand to hand, for four hundred years already, and a single bad night can end its travels. What sits in the cases now — Zhangzhou ware plates lined up against a wall, blue-and-white Delft jars, mantelpieces tiled in fired porcelain, the Princess's own collection beside the notary's — survived four centuries of trade, war, fashion, and one recent burglary. The thatched roof of the Princessehof has covered all of it.