This article explores images of the house in Dutch language poetry from the postwar period. On the one hand, the archetypical notion of the house has always had an established place in poetry. It is connected to the meaning of house as a building and especially as an imaginative house or a home. On the other hand, the house is a rich metaphorical concept used for explaining poetical ideas. In a historical survey of modern poetry, different images of the house are presented. The overview shows that the choice of certain metaphorical concepts is connected to literary and extra-literary contexts, and to the poetical ideas of poets. Conceptual integration – Blending Theory – is used in this paper as a theoretical frame. From this perspective a poem is seen as a complex blend, a network of connections which are constructed during the reading and interpreting processes.