A man working at a cluttered workbench beneath a wall of hanging tools in a dim workshop

Geerstraat 14 · first floor

Two benches,
four hands,
no rep.

Veldhof is Joris and Hidde, a mill, a tumbler and a rack of acetate sheet. Twelve frames a run, three runs a year, and every one of them finished within three metres of where you are looking.

Joris Veldhof at the bench, first floor

We started because the optician across the river had four hundred frames and could not tell us who made any of them.

Joris had spent eleven years glazing other people's frames and getting them back six months later with hinges that could not be replaced because the part did not exist. Hidde came from furniture and knew what a tumbler does to a flat surface. In 2021 they took the first floor above a bike shop on Geerstraat, bought a secondhand mill from a workshop closing in Sabae, and cut thirty-one fronts before one was worth keeping.

The business is deliberately small. Twelve frames in a run means a sheet of acetate is bought for a reason rather than hedged, and it means every front can be filed by the person who drew it. It also means we sell out, which we have decided is better than a warehouse of colourways nobody chose.

The photographs on this site are the other half of that. Nobody models for us. When a frame goes out of the fitting room we ask whether we can take one picture, in whatever light is in the room, and that is the picture the shop page uses until the run ends.

Sheet to face,
in four moves

Draw and mill

A front is drawn at 1:1 on paper, then cut from 6 mm block acetate on the mill. Four hours of drawing for about nine minutes of cutting.

Eleven days turning

Into the tumbler with walnut shell, then with paste. Nothing is buffed by machine afterwards; the shine is abrasion, not lacquer.

Hinge and file

Five-barrel hinges are heat-sunk into the temples and the rims are filed by hand until a lens drops in with one thumb and stays.

Fit, then photograph

Adjusted on your face in the room downstairs, and then one picture, if you will let us. That picture is what sells the next one.

See what came out of run 04 →

A man under a desk lamp at a long bench covered in small tools, photographed in black and white

The quiet part

Most of a frame
is waiting.

Eleven days in the tumbler, two days for the acetate to settle after milling, a fortnight for a lens order to come back from Apeldoorn. There is perhaps six hours of actual hand work in a Kessel and about five weeks of calendar. That is why a run is twelve and why we will not promise you a frame by Friday.

What six hours buys

Hidde Grevink at the polishing bench, first floor