Purse Strings

AMSTELVEEN, The Netherlands—Amstelveen, a glossy community near Amsterdam favored by corporate expats, doesn’t look like the setting for a fairy tale. But it was just that for Hendrikje and Heinz Ivo. It’s the place where the couple were able to amass the world’s finest collection of handbags and related objects, from luggage to compacts, and open the world’s first handbag museum in which to show their almost 4,000 items. Once upon a time was more than 30 years ago, when an emptying nest sent Hendrikje out into the world, where handbags were waiting for her. But decades passed before a fairy godfather entered the story and performed the magic that has brought the collection to a wider audience.

Today, Hendrikje Ivo, 71, and Heinz, 75, occupy an apartment in a modern building overlooking a broad canal. Gliding cyclists are the only passersby. Upon entering the flat, a visitor notices an embossed leather clutch bag in an illuminated display case set into the wall opposite the front door. Made in Japan in the 1930s for the export market, the purse is ornamented with tiny faux-ivory elephants parading across a landscape. (Similar souvenirs of lesser quality, brought home by globe-trotters, still turn up in London and New York antiques markets for under $100.) Hendrikje is responsible for this fanciful acquisition; bags from the 19th and 20th centuries are her passion and make up three-quarters of the pair’s collection. Happily for its overall range, each Ivo’s taste perfectly complements the other’s.

“She wouldn’t be willing to pay for 17th-century reticules like this one,” says tall, erect Heinz, pointing to a tasseled red-silk drawstring bag embroidered with gilt thread exhibited in the living room’s floor-to-ceiling display case. “I would pay anything.” The very oldest item in the collection is also the most expensive: a merchant’s pouch from the 16th century, before men’s clothing had pockets (they were introduced a century later). It is made of the softest pale goatskin and sports 18 miniature envelopes decorated with flower appliqués.

“A merchant in those days had to deal with the fact that every city had its own money,” explains Heinz. Twenty-five years ago, the pouch cost 30,000 guilders, then about $10,000. In 2000, Christie’s sold a late 17th-century embroidered wallet with some similarities to the pouch for £44,650, more than $74,000 at the time. Bags that were made before the 19th century are as rare as they are sought after, but they do show up occasionally in European auctions.

Hendrikje’s favorite piece in the collection is a petite German bag from the 1920s. On its front is an ivory panel with a cutout silhouette of an insouciant young woman looking up at a fruiting apple branch and holding a single apple in her dainty hand. “Naughty Eve,” Hendrikje says, laughing. “And look,” she points out with delight, “the bag is snakeskin.” Asked how much this witty purse cost, Hendrikje replies in fluent, if charmingly imperfect English, “I always say to everybody, I don’t like to talk about money.” And she doesn’t.

Hendrikje set out on the course that led to handbag collecting more than 35 years ago. She and Heinz, an executive with the American candy giant Mars, had lived with their daughter and two sons in Germany for eleven years. In 1973 Heinz was transferred back to Holland, where they bought both units of a semidetached house in Amstelveen.

That year, with their children in school, Hendrikje took a stall in a large Amsterdam antiques market. “I sold things that live in a bag,” she says. “Pillboxes, lipstick cases, combs, compacts, mirrors.” Work frequently took Heinz to England. Hendrikje would join him on the weekends, and they would scour antiques shops.

Hendrikje thought handbags would make eye-catching props for her stall. The couple picked up one or two. Then, in 1974, they found a German tortoiseshell bag, circa 1820, profusely inlaid with mother-of-pearl flowers. “It triggered for us how beautiful a bag could be, how interesting the material was,” says Heinz.