Average income per resident in the Archipelbuurt was 63,100 euro in 2024.
That is the highest figure of any district in this guide and close to double the city’s 35,200, and it comes with an average household size of 1.7, which is the lowest of any expensive part of The Hague.
Rich, and not full of children: that combination is the whole character of the place.
Two districts, one postcode feeling
The Archipelbuurt was laid out between 1860 and 1890 on the former Duinweide estate, in the neo-Renaissance style of the period, and its streets are named after places in the Dutch East Indies, with a few taken from Suriname and the Antilles.
Willemspark, immediately west of it, has an odder history.
William II bought the land in 1840 and laid out an English garden with a riding school on it; William III sold the ground to the city in 1855 on the condition that a villa district be built there, and the villas went up between 1860 and 1900 to a plan by the municipal architect W.C. van der Waeyen Pieterszen.
Together with Willemspark II, the Archipelbuurt is one of the nineteen protected townscapes of The Hague.
That status is visible from the street: no plastic windows, no roof terraces bolted on the front, and a level of exterior consistency that is unusual even by Dutch standards.
Willemspark is tiny.
It had 1,684 residents in 2026 across 1,075 households.
The Archipelbuurt had 6,269 in 3,570 households.
Between them that is under 8,000 people in what is, by walking distance, the very centre of The Hague.
Who lives there
The Archipelbuurt split in 2025 was 51% Dutch origin, 22% from elsewhere in Europe and 27% from outside Europe.
Willemspark is more international still at 42, 27 and 31.
The non-European figure in both is not the city’s usual composition; it is diplomats, international court and institution staff, and the households attached to them.
Canada, Denmark, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Pakistan, Poland and Vietnam all keep missions in Willemspark, and the old Hague city hall on the Javastraat at number 26 sits among them.
Willemspark’s income is similar to the Archipelbuurt’s at 61,000 euro per resident, from 2023 figures, but its tenure is different: 40% owner-occupied against the Archipelbuurt’s 56%, with 59% rented.
Willemspark is a landlords’ district, which is precisely why so many postings land there.
The money
Average WOZ value in 2025 was 658,000 euro in the Archipelbuurt and 564,000 in Willemspark, against 383,000 across the city.
The Archipelbuurt therefore sits alongside Benoordenhout and just under the Statenkwartier at the top of the market.
Seventy-four per cent of Archipelbuurt homes are flats and 64% predate 1945.
What that describes is the classic Hague arrangement of a tall canal-side house split into two or three apartments with high ceilings, deep rooms and a staircase you will learn to hate when moving a sofa.
Whole houses exist, they come up rarely, and they are priced accordingly.
Rental turnover is good here, better than in Benoordenhout, because the private stock is large and geared to two and three-year postings.
If your employer has a housing allowance, this is where the agents will steer you.
Read tenant rights, deposits and contracts before you sign a furnished short-stay agreement here, because furnished lettings at this end of the market carry terms that a Dutch unfurnished contract would not.
Estate agents in The Hague who specialise in diplomatic lets dominate this postcode.
Getting about
Tram 1 runs along the wide section of the Javastraat, on the boundary between the two districts, together with bus lines 22, 24 and 28.
That is your route to the centre in a few minutes and to Scheveningen in about fifteen.
The tram and bus network explains the ticketing.
Mostly, though, you walk.
The Plein, the Binnenhof, the Mauritshuis, Noordeinde and the Denneweg are all inside twenty minutes on foot, and Den Haag Centraal is a walk rather than a journey.
This is the most genuinely central of the expensive districts, and the one where a car is least useful.
Parking is permit-controlled and tight, which is covered in parking permits in The Hague.
The beach is the trade-off.
Scheveningen is a tram ride, not a walk, so this is not the district to pick if daily sea air is the point.
Scheveningen and Duindorp is where that argument is made.
Saturday, and the rest of the week
The lower Bankastraat is the shopping street: a proper one, with grocers, a fishmonger, delicatessens, wine and cafes, at a scale between De Fred and a village high street.
Around it, the Frederikstraat, the narrow end of the Javastraat and the Denneweg carry the design, antique, art and fashion shops, plus most of the restaurants.
It is expensive and it is very good.
The cultural anchor is Panorama Mesdag on the Zeestraat, the circular painting made in 1881 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, his wife Sientje and several artist friends, with De Mesdag Collectie in their former home on the Laan van Meerdervoort, a museum since 1886.
Plein 1813, where the Alexanderstraat meets the Sophialaan, carries the monument to the founding of the Kingdom and the defeat of Napoleon, and functions as the district’s front garden.
Evenings are civilised rather than lively.
The Denneweg has bars that stay open and a crowd that skews older and better dressed; the Archipelbuurt itself is residential and quiet after ten.
It is a fifteen-minute walk to the noise of the Grote Markt if you want it, which is the best of both arrangements, and the case for actually living in that noise is in Centrum and the Chinatown end.
The honest drawbacks
It is small, it is old and it turns over slowly.
There were 315 registered crimes in the Archipelbuurt in 2025, about 50 per thousand residents against the city’s 69, and Willemspark’s 126 crimes across only 1,684 residents look worse per head than they are, because the district contains museums, embassies and a great deal of passing traffic that does not live there.
The real difficulty is that nothing about this district is priced for a normal salary.
If you are not on a diplomatic or institutional package, you are competing with people who are.
The realistic version of the same walkable-centre life at a fraction of the money is the Zeeheldenkwartier, ten minutes west, where the average WOZ value is 437,000 rather than 658,000.
The other drawback is the one nobody mentions: household size of 1.7 means this is not a district of families.
Children are here, at the international schools in The Hague and at the Dutch schools around the Bankastraat, but there are fewer of them per street than in Benoordenhout or the Statenkwartier, and the playground network that comes with them is correspondingly thin.
For a single person or a couple who want to walk to everything and can pay for the privilege, nothing else in the city competes.
Which district suits which life sets the eleven side by side.
Sources
- AlleCijfers, wijk Archipelbuurt (gemeente Den Haag): 6,269 inhabitants in 2026; 3,570 households and average household size 1.7 in 2025; origin 51% Netherlands, 22% Europe, 27% outside Europe in 2025; average WOZ value 658,000 euro in 2025; 56% owner-occupied and 44% rented; 74% flats and 64% built before 1945; average income 63,100 euro per resident and 76,900 euro per earner in 2024; population density 7,195 per km2; 315 registered crimes in 2025
- AlleCijfers, wijk Willemspark (gemeente Den Haag): 1,684 inhabitants in 2026; 1,075 households and average household size 1.6; origin 42% Netherlands, 27% Europe, 31% outside Europe in 2025; average WOZ value 564,000 euro in 2025; 40% owner-occupied and 59% rented; 78% flats and 59% built before 1945; average income 61,000 euro per resident and 73,000 euro per earner in 2023; population density 5,227 per km2; 126 registered crimes in 2025
- AlleCijfers, gemeente Den Haag: average WOZ 383,000 euro in 2025, average income 35,200 euro per resident in 2024, 69 registered crimes per 1,000 inhabitants in 2025
- Dutch Wikipedia, Archipelbuurt: laid out between 1860 and 1890 on the former Duinweide estate, predominantly neo-Renaissance, streets named after places in the Dutch East Indies with some after Suriname and the Antilles, one of the nineteen protected townscapes of The Hague together with Willemspark II, the former city hall at Javastraat 26, the Damesleesmuseum and the Vredeskapel of 1880
- Dutch Wikipedia, Willemspark: William II bought the land in 1840 and laid out an English garden with the Willemshof riding school; William III sold the ground to the municipality in 1855 on condition that a villa district be created; plan by municipal architect W.C. van der Waeyen Pieterszen with villas built between 1860 and 1900; Plein 1813 at the junction of Alexanderstraat and Sophialaan with the monument to the founding of the Kingdom and the victory over Napoleon; Panorama Mesdag on the Zeestraat, painted in 1881 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, his wife Sientje and befriended artists; De Mesdag Collectie in their house on the Laan van Meerdervoort, opened as a museum in 1886; embassies of Canada, Denmark, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Pakistan, Poland and Vietnam
- Dutch Wikipedia, Javastraat (Den Haag): tram line 1 and bus lines 22, 24 and 28 run through the wide section of the Javastraat, which lies on the boundary between Willemspark and the Archipelbuurt; the lower part of the Bankastraat is the neighbourhood’s main shopping street
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