After the Hofwijck Society obtained ownership of the estate, preparations for restoration are immediately made. The goal is clear: the house and garden should be returned as much as possible to the appearance as intended by its creator Constantijn Huygens.

A short survey of the state of affairs shows the extent of the mutilation that had occurred over the centuries. The house stands dismantled and desolate in a drab pond full of mud. The beautiful chimney iron ornament has disappeared, as have the roof tiles, the stained-glass windows, the shutters, the grisailles and the statues full of symbolism. Due to the front extension, the house lost many of its elegant proportions. Because this extension was placed on the site of the former bridge, the house is now directly connected to the entrance and no longer surrounded by water on all sides. Neighbors see mainly a plump ‘pepper pot’ in water and no longer the beautiful bottle in a cooling cooler, as Huygens had designed the house. Also the entrance no longer resembles the beautiful Rialto Bridge of the creator. It looks like a neglected spit of land full of capriciously knotted lindens, where grass and tree roots stick out in all directions. The house has degenerated into the battered head of an equally battered garden body. In fact, there is nothing left of this garden so meticulously designed by Huygens. All the human forms of Vitruvius have disappeared from it. Many of the straight ditches have been filled in and the tight symmetrical avenues replaced by winding paths.

The paradisiacal orchard of the past looks like a wild wasteland, as was already described, as vividly as it is disconcerting, by Th. Morren during his visit to Hofwijck in 1896. How ‘battered’ the condition was that the committee found can be clearly seen on the 18 razor sharp photos that architect De Zwart, as a member of the restoration committee, had taken by the Hague photographer Happel: nine photos of the desolate exterior including the overgrown garden and nine of the dilapidated interior of Hofwijck. On some of these photos Xavery's eighteenth-century ‘whites’, which Jacob des Tombe had applied to the interior, can still be seen.