Luiten Brand Guidelines: A 1993 Naaldwijk Family Firm Building Garden Centres and Screens

A father and son in an attic room.

Luiten Greenhouses is a Dutch family business that builds garden centres and production greenhouses and installs screen and insect-netting systems. The company says it began in 1993 under the name A & N Luiten Technisch Advies — “technical advice” — founded by Arno and Nico Luiten, whom it describes as father and son, working from an attic room in Naaldwijk, in the Westland area of South Holland.

Its own timeline traces a steady run of moves within the same district. In 1995 the business bought a site in Honselersdijk with a shed of about 295 square metres; in 1996 it moved to a 308-square-metre building nearby, and in 2000 it bought the property next door. In 2005 it moved to its present site in De Lier, with about 2,540 square metres, and in 2010 it expanded there again by buying neighbouring buildings, the company says.

The present name dates from 2013. Hortidaily reported in July 2013 that A&N Luiten BV had become Luiten Greenhouses, a change that the notice said was meant to strengthen its position at home and abroad as a partner for complete horticultural projects, production greenhouses, screen installations and horticultural inventory. The same notice placed it in the Luiten Group, alongside HBS Designs Ltd., Saarlucon BV, Rimini BV and Salutrans BV, and gave the group’s slogan as “Growing together for an optimal result.” The company’s own timeline records the new legal name as Luiten Greenhouses B.V.

The business still presents itself as a family firm. Its website names Nico Luiten as chief executive and Richard Luiten as chief financial officer, and its history page describes “a true family business built on drive and honesty” that, it says, has grown into a global player in greenhouse horticulture over more than thirty years.

Garden centres first, then screens.

Luiten says its work at first covered only the construction, renovation and maintenance of garden centres, and soon widened into screen and blackout installations and greenhouse cover systems. Its website now groups the business into four product areas: screen systems, insect-netting systems, production greenhouses and garden centres, and it also supplies horticultural equipment.

The screen range covers horizontal, vertical and diagonal installations and ridge screens. Greenhouse screens are sheets of cloth drawn across the roof or down the walls of the structure; Luiten’s pages list among their uses diffusing sunlight, holding back excess sun, blackout for controlled day length and screening the glow of grow lights from outside. Its insect-netting systems come in cassette, integrated and fixed versions.

For production greenhouses it offers the Venlo type and a Cabrio greenhouse, whose roof halves can be opened and closed. The company describes two versions, MX 2, in which both halves of each roof section open independently, and MX 4, which can also close one half lower so that ventilation can continue in rain. It quotes spans of up to 20 metres and column heights of up to 12 metres, aluminium roof systems and gutters with built-in condensate drainage.

Garden centres remain a specialism, and the company’s pages describe designing the shopper’s walking route and the layout of the sales floor as part of a project. A documented example is Natuurlijk Tilburg. Floraldaily reported in May 2020 that Luiten Greenhouses had built the greenhouse structure, the screen installations and the sandwich roof and façades of the new garden centre in Tilburg, on the site of an old Overvecht shop, under one roof with an animal centre and next to a DIY store. The article said the glass greenhouses gave the garden centre an open look, with the closed store and animal department behind it; its photographs were credited to Luiten.

The company groups its customers by crop as well as by trade: vegetable growing, soft fruit, cut flowers, pot plants and garden centres each have their own page on its website.

Greenhouse builders and horticulture technology.

Greenhouse builders sell something most people never see from the inside: a glass roof that can run for hectares, the steel and aluminium that holds it up, and the heating, cooling, water and climate systems below it. Their pictures tend to repeat a small set of scenes. Long glasshouse roofs catch low evening light; inside, tomato and pepper rows climb toward hanging gutters, shade screens sit half-drawn under the glass, and a climate computer glows on a grower’s desk. The images sell scale and control rather than a single product.

Much of the Dutch side of the trade grew up in and around the Westland, the district south-west of The Hague that Dalsem calls the traditional heart of Dutch horticulture. Certhon gives its headquarters as Poeldijk, in the Westland, and Dalsem gives its address as Den Hoorn, close by. Dalsem traces itself to a blacksmith who started work in the Westland in 1932, and Certhon says it began as a family business in 1896; both have since passed to larger groups, and the guides in this series set out who owns what today and when that changed.

The trade meets at fairs. GreenTech Amsterdam, held at the RAI exhibition centre, said in January 2018 that it would become an annual event, and builders use their stands as showrooms: in June 2022 Certhon said its stand had a large greenhouse deck hanging from the hall’s truss, with a harvesting robot on display beneath it. Trade titles such as Hortidaily report the projects, product launches and changes of ownership that follow.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — when it began, who owns it, where it says it works and what it makes — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and type are our own interpretation, not the companies’ identities.

Built on experience, made for success.

Luiten works closely with Saarlucon, a fellow member of the Luiten Group that shares its business complex in De Lier. The company dates that cooperation to 2004 and says Saarlucon develops and builds production and sales greenhouses and has a strong position in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Together, Luiten says, the two work as a total supplier, with projects in Europe, North, Central and South America, Asia, Oceania and North Africa, and with more than 25 years of international experience.

Its website is published in Dutch, English and German and opens with the line “Built on experience, Made for success.” Its about page sets out the values it says it works by, among them “Only the best is good enough” and “Everything starts with the customer,” and promises “no tall tales or castles in the air,” a literal rendering of a Dutch figure of speech. It describes a flat organisation with short lines of communication and a no-nonsense attitude. Its recent news posts cover appearances at the FLORALL trade fair, the GreenTech show and the Green Expo in Ghent in 2026.

The name needs care online: the address luiten.nl belongs to an unrelated interior-fitting firm, Luiten Interieurbouw, while the greenhouse company uses luiten-greenhouses.com.

For a design guide, Luiten shows how a family installer can build a name from a surname and a plain statement of what it builds. Compare Dalsem, another Dutch greenhouse builder, and Svensson, the Swedish maker of greenhouse screens. For this guide we use a deep green and a pale glass tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Luiten’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.