Frank van Vloten was a patrician with money, opinions, and roughly 360 hectares of fresh land to fill. In 1895 he and his brother Willem founded Nieuw Nunspeet, a forestry venture on the western edge of the Veluwe, and in 1906 they laid the first stone of the house that would name itself. Three floors, a flat roof, and a perfectly round footprint - the entrance drive curled around the building before climbing to the second-floor doorway, where a balcony wrapped the entire structure. On the third floor, an inner gallery received its light from a colored glass dome in the roof. Around the house, gardens grew into a full landscape park stocked with imported species Van Vloten wanted to test against Dutch soil. It was the kind of project a man builds when he believes in the future of trees.

Van Vloten did not just plant a forest. He moved through it. To connect his estate to Nunspeet railway station, he laid a narrow-gauge tramway in Decauville-style portable track and pulled the cars with ponies. It was a half-toy, half-utility line that let staff and supplies thread through the Veluwe pines without trampling new plantings. The railway is gone. The route is gone. But one carriage survived, restored to working order and now living on a Dutch heritage railway - a small wooden ghost of a man's habit of doing things his own way.

When Van Vloten died in 1930 the estate was carved up and sold. The house passed to Staatsbosbeheer, the state forestry service, and began its long slide. Then the war arrived, and the Round House became something its builder could not have imagined: a labour camp of the Arbeitseinsatz, the German forced-labour program. Nearby, refugees and onderduikers hid in a forest shelter that locals later called the Verscholen Dorp, the Hidden Village. In 1944 the occupiers built a Rheinbote ballistic missile launchpad on the estate - the kind of four-stage solid-fuelled rocket the late-war Wehrmacht hoped would change everything and changed nothing. After liberation, the buildings drifted through several uses: a resort for families in difficulty, a holiday camp from 1961 to 1966, and finally the wrecking crew.

A round house, a wealthy recluse, a vanished estate, a war: it was almost too good a vacuum for storytelling. Beginning with a 1976 article and accelerating through a 2006 piece, an online discussion thread, and a 2012 book, a narrative took hold that Frank van Vloten had been a Pan-Germanist cult member who staged occult rituals beneath his colored glass dome. The Dutch skeptical magazine Skepter and the history magazine G-Geschiedenis both pushed back in 2013. Two crime novels published in 2014 borrowed the imagery anyway. A new non-fiction book in 2014 finally called the whole thing what it was - a saga - and concluded there is no evidence at all that Van Vloten was anything stranger than an opinionated forestry experimentalist with a fondness for unusual shapes.

The Round House itself is a footprint in the soil. The Nunspeet golf course occupies part of the former estate, its fairways running through the experimental forestry Van Vloten started over a century ago. The ponds remain. The rhododendrons still bloom each spring. The Honey locust, a North American tree with no business standing in Gelderland, keeps growing. From above, the curving paths and the soft geometry of the landscape garden read like an architectural sketch that someone tried, halfway through, to erase. Most of it is back to woods. The story, somehow, is still going.