During Royal events the floor of the Citizen’s Hall is covered with a carpet to protect the valuable marble maps. With the years the old carpet needed to be replaced. In the ‘90s the Dutch artist Ria van Eyk was commissioned to design a new carpet which suited the designated hall, the floor and the history of the Royal Palace.

Never before had a carpet of such proportions been woven in the Netherlands: it was to measure almost six hundred square metres (31.84 metres by 17.75 metres). The more than thousand colours Van Eyk used in her countless sketches and designs were reduced to eight basic colours and added with black, white and grey. The design itself, a view on the heavens, was based on a photograph of the Milky Way chosen by Van Eyk. In the centre of the carpet we find the Hale-Bopp comet, which was visible during eighteen months in 1997. Due to all the 21st-century technologies the knowledge and the image of the universe changed considerably in comparison to the 17th-century marble starry sky.