Peutz was born in a Catholic family in Uithuizen in Groningen, a mostly Protestant province in the north of the Netherlands.

In 1920, while still not graduated, he returned to Limburg to settle as an independent architect in the town of Heerlen, where the booming coal mining industry provided him with many assignments.

But because his work was done in and around Heerlen, a city that lost its status as an industrial centre in the decades to come, he has been somewhat forgotten.

But in recent years he is being rediscovered, exemplified by the proclamation of his Glaspaleis as one of the world's 1000 most important buildings of the 20th century, and also due to Wiel Arets' – a contemporary Dutch architect also from Heerlen – many publications on Peutz produced in the past ten years.

Peutz was also responsible for the adjacent Pancratiuskerk (for Monumentenzorg – 'Monument Care') and the juxtaposition between this old Romanesque church and the ultramodern department store is typical for his mixing of the old and the new.