Since 1874, Museum De Lakenhal has been housed in a beautiful, historic city palace: the Laecken-Halle. The city palace was built in 1640 by the famous architect Arent van 's-Gravesande and is one of the top Dutch buildings from the Golden Age. For centuries, it served as an inspection hall for woolen cloth fabrics that were exported from Leiden all over the world. The original front of the building is still completely intact, but a lot has changed on the inside over time.

This resulted in a palette of building parts from different times. The starting point for the restoration is to strike a balance between these layers of time, according to the principle of 'unity in diversity'. The four building parts will soon be visible and accessible from a central courtyard, the Achterplaets. Traces of almost 375 years of building history are not erased, but rather shown. This gives each building part its own character: the seventeenth-century cloth hall, the nineteenth-century art galleries, the twentieth-century Papevleugel and the new, twenty-first-century.