Coming Home

A celebration of the innovative, artisanal, and sustainable living exemplified by contemporary Dutch interiors.

With a carefully curated collection of interiors, including historic canal houses, restored farms, and green homes, belonging to interior designers, product designers, architects, and artists, this book showcases creative and resourceful living. These properties have been created or renovated and brought into the twenty-first century with typical Dutch style and sensibility—environmentally friendly, imaginative uses of space filled with color and charm and never to be taken too seriously.

Each home in the book reflects the personality and spirit of the people who inhabit it. From furniture designer Valentin Loellman’s handcrafted interiors in a traditional worker’s cottage on the Maas river to fiber artist Claudy Jongstra’s farmhouse in Friesland where indigo dye plants grow in the biodynamic garden, Coming Home illustrates fun ideas and easy ways to incorporate individual style into your surroundings. Whether it’s the traditional “lowlands” aesthetic of combining old and new, faded and inviting, into a casual chic or a quirky reinvention of a space that reveals a touch of eccentricity, this book illustrates why the Netherlands is truly loved by so many and can be an inspiration to us all.

Barbara de Vries was born in Amsterdam. She has spent most of her career as a designer in the fashion business and in 1991, she created the CK collections at Calvin Klein and subsequently had her own collections in the U.S. and Japan. In 2009, Barbara and her husband, author Alastair Gordon, founded Gordon de Vries Studio, an imprint that publishes illustrated books on design and lifestyle. She is also a passionate anti-plastic-pollution activist. When her twin daughters moved to the Netherlands to study design, Barbara saw her home country through their eyes and realized that the Dutch way of life had never really left her. Lidewij Edelkoort is one of the world’s most famous trend forecasters.