He was chiefly known for his house designs and his involvement in the flourishing of Nieuwe Kunst (the Dutch strand of Art Nouveau or Jugendstil) in the early years of the twentieth century.

Johan Mutters would eventually collaborate regularly with his cousin Herman Pieter III (1855–1922) on designs at world's expositions (Paris 1900, Roubaix 1911), as well as industrial buildings.

[2] The talented and skilled Mutters, who had become familiar with the various trends in architectural practice of the era and begun to make extensive social contacts, attracted numerous clients in the 1880s.

At the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, he showed his design for a house at 35 Jan van Nassaustraat in The Hague, where his choice of the English Tudor style is complemented by Jugendstil details both at the entrance and at the gates.

In 1914 Jan Wils became an apprentice draftsman for Mutters, but would leave to set up his own office two years later and become a member of De Stijl; he would go on to design the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam for the 1928 games.

Suburban development beyond The Hague attracted many investors, including Mutters, who was a shareholder in the three joint-stock companies "Exploitatie Maatschappij Park de Kieviet," "Wildrust" and "Kievietsduin," and he drew up the plans for these communities and designed many of their buildings between 1914 and his death sixteen years later.

Mutters’ plans for the communities respected the contours and elements of the natural environment, particularly the ponds and trees, with curving roads that created an irregular layout and intersected at squares.

[6] The most noteworthy of the three is De Kievet, formally in Waasenaar, where Mutters designed several houses using numerous variations of the modest English cottage, undoubtedly an homage to the well-established British Garden City model.

[6] Eventually, in the 1920s, Mutters was asked to develop a master plan for the municipality of Waasenaar, into which he invested a significant amount of time and effort, ultimately projecting population growth into a city of 500,000 residents, a rather unlikely prospect.