Although he was born to a comfortable middle-class background, married a wealthy heiress, and for a while was able to subsidise the publication of the De Stijl journal,[1] van 't Hoff was a member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands in the years following World War I.

Van 't Hoff was born in Rotterdam, the son of an eminent bacteriologist, and grew up in comfortable and cultured middle class circumstances.

[2] From 1911 to 1914 van 't Hoff studied at the Architectural Association in London, where he became a friend of the cubist and futurist painter David Bomberg and through him became acquainted with the work of the avant-garde Omega Workshops.

Over the next two years he was to write five articles for the De Stijl journal – three radical essays on the future of architecture and two critical pieces on buildings by Jan Wils and Antonio Sant' Elia.

The first De Stijl manifesto, published in November 1918, was interpreted by most of the group's members as a largely artistic statement, rather than the revolutionary document van 't Hoff sought.

Van't Hoff criticised Van Doesburg in the summer of 1919 for exhibiting individually rather than maintaining an exclusive commitment to the De Stijl collective.

[2] Disillusioned with the revolutionary potential of the artistic avant-garde, van 't Hoff sold his houseboat and moved to Laren in North Holland in 1920, where he built two small houses for himself and his parents that were largely devoid of the abstract aesthetic ambitions of his earlier works – one even had a thatched roof.

Although these featured some furniture and interior design work by Beekman and Rietveld, van 't Hoff had distanced himself from his earlier artistic lifestyle.

"[2] In 1922 van 't Hoff moved to London with his family, spending most of the following five years promoting his communist and anarchist ideas in England and frequenting the British Museum Reading Room.

[10] The ill health of their daughter led the van 't Hoffs to move to Davos in Switzerland in 1931, but in 1937 they returned to England to settle permanently in Hampshire.