Villa Mondriaan, Winterswijk, Netherlands

The Villa Mondriaan

The Villa Mondriaan is a unique museum based partly in the childhood home of pioneering abstract artist Piet Mondriaan. The museum displays a collection of Mondriaan’s early realist works alongside the work of his tutors, transporting visitors into the life of Piet Mondriaan.

The Goal

After temporarily closing due to COVID-19, Villa Mondriaan was looking for an easy-to-use, cost-effective platform to help them reopen. With a staff made up predominantly of volunteers and facing the task of implementing social distancing measures in the newly reopened museum, Villa Mondriaan needed to share their audio tour safely for visitors that wouldn’t waste staff time. They also wanted to highlight key works in their collection and share Piet Mondriaan’s early realist works with a wide audience.

Smartify’s Solution

We gave the Villa Mondriaan access to the Smartify dashboard to manually manage the visitor experience. This enabled gallery staff to easily create guided tours by dragging and dropping works into a trail and customising an interactive tour. By using Smartify’s easy-to-use content creation tools, focusing on key artworks, and using preexisting audio, the Villa Mondriaan was able to reopen easily with the Smartify audio guide set up and ready to go in a matter of weeks.

The Smartify CMS provides standard functionality plus fields for video, audio, hyperlinks, multiple images, interactive maps, and 3D scans. Narratives can be developed for specific audiences such as children, researchers, or the general public for instance.

The Results

In the first month the museum was reopened, the app was used almost 8000 times to discover more about the works in the collection. The museum launched a one-hour tour of the collection delivered straight to users' devices, ready in time for reopening, that was listened to over 2000 times during the first month.