His father, George Hendrik Bauer,[4] was a decorator and his mother, Maria Suzanne Verpoorten, came from a family of painters.

Bauer studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, his fellow students included Karel de Bazel, Willem Kromhout.

[7] Bauer was best known in the Netherlands as the architect of the colony Walden started by the Dutch writer and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, where he also had his atelier in a hut he designed himself.

[9] In the Netherlands, in the course of the nineties of the 19th-century, the idea of fair, rural architecture was picked up, just as with the English Arts and Crafts movement of the 1870s.

The newspaper Hilversumsche Courant of 30 April 1904 wrote in a necrology: He understood the rare art of building a homely house.