Double Dutch

II'm tossing liquor bottles in the air overhead and watching them crash to the floor while a webcam films on. My inner voice notes that I should have stopped once my guide used an ’80s reference to urge me to perform with a little flair. "You know, like the movie Cocktail?"

I hadn’t intended for my visit to Amsterdam’s House of Bols to be quite so…interactive. How did I end up here? The story begins a few years ago, the start of my love affair with Dutch design (or, more accurately, Dutch designers, who seem to know how to put the fun back in functional furniture). Whether it’s Holland’s cloudy coastal weather (so familiar to this Vancouverite) that has them looking for a bright light, or the recreational activity the rest of the world associates with Amsterdammers (and with my home city, for that matter), the Dutch design aesthetic of life-size horse lamps (from Moooi), light-up elephant stools (Droog), or even Tord Boontje’s lacy Garland chandelier is a far cry from the straight-edge, quiet, natural design that hails from the West Coast. I want to see what the party people of the design world look like, up close and personal.
But back to Bols. My visit here isn’t so out of whack with my purpose for the journey. The mothership of Moooi, the house of Droog and the architecture of the Eastern Docklands were all on the agenda, but it was my first night and I was willing to relax the rules a little. As it turned out, the tasting house of the original Dutch genever (the Dutch invented genever, the Americans stole the recipe, tweaked it, and called it gin) had just swept the Dutch Design Awards for its cleverly rethought digs. I could break and still get my education on. (And, with webcam pointed at my bottle-tossing self, send a little Facebook note home, too.)
The House of Bols is pretty, to be sure: each room designed to guide the user through the 36 bottles of Bols that the company produces, all culminating in the modern tasting parlour (read: a big glass of some Bols-flavoured concoction). But I’m quickly realizing that sipping blue cocktails and-though the design of the bottles’ skinny ridged necks practically begs them to be tossed around like bowling pins-testing out my inner Cocktail isn’t quite working for the intent of this trip.
Fortunately, it’s not difficult to get back on track. For a country about a quarter of the size of Vancouver Island and nearly 16 million strong, Holland is incredibly celebratory of its design accomplishments. Despite its reputation as a tulip-loving, clog-wearing people (and you will see plenty of both), the Dutch seem to pay the same kind of attention to design that others pay to their mother cuisine. For two months each fall, the Dutch Design Double sees events all over Amsterdam and Utrecht, with programs from the serious (a design competition for Hema, the Ikea of the Netherlands) to the quirky (designers creating new products out of stools, handkerchiefs, dog baskets, wallets and other items seized during liquidation of bankrupt businesses).

So it’s out to the streets to soak in the contrasts that make up Amsterdam. I bypass the tourists cruising through Amsterdam’s nine straatjes-a trendy strip of streets connecting the canals (though not without popping in to pick up a sweet waterproof bike-seat cover-the Dutch know bikes). Today, it’s all to lead me toward Droog, a surprisingly humble storefront-cum-museum showcasing the design powerhouse’s commissions from over the last 17 years.

It’s a thrill to witness just how this humble firm of two has become so influential. Cofounded in 1993 by product designer Gijs Bakker and design historian Renny Ramakers (Bakker has since left the firm), Droog launched the careers of many a Dutch designer-including its most famous son, Marcel Wanders, who went on to create Moooi.

What makes the firm-and my stop at their flagship-so interesting is the path of most resistance it’s cut through the traditional design world. On display are the non-furniture prototypes that you can’t help but view with awe: a chest of drawers by Tejo Remy made from a half-dozen wooden drawers tied into a bundle; the Cow chair by Niels van Eijk, made from untreated cowhide stretched around a form wet then solidified; the One Day Paper Waste sidetable by Jens Praet, made from shredded confidential documents bound with resin. Each makes its own comment on consumerism and design, but with sense of humour firmly intact. ("Droog" in fact translates as "dry"-dry wit, say, or a wry, subtle sense of humour.)

It’s also soon to be a stone’s throw from a new (and first of its kind) Droog hotel. Designed in partnership with Tokyo’s Atelier Bow-Wow, the white-on-white hotel will preserve the original old-Amsterdam riverhouse façade with uber-modern interiors (and just 10 rooms for "members only," whatever that will mean). The street-level restaurant promises to pivot around "market leftovers"-which, unappealing as it sounds, will doubtless be magic under Droog’s guidance.

Given Marcel Wanders beginnings in the incubators at Droog, it’s no surprise that his Moooi would share that sentiment. (If not literally in name: Moooi comes from the Dutch word mooi, meaning beautiful. The extra "o" gives it an "extra beautiful" nod.) My journey to Moooi means hopping the efficient tram line, and I’m ashamed for my North American unilingual ways as I discover that all ages-from the elderly man behind the bar to kids I hear chittering in the street-easily switch from Dutch to English with barely a trace of accent. The 700-square-metre Moooi Gallery in the Jordaan neighbourhood (where Rembrandt is said to have spent the last years of his life) is a design-junkie’s nirvana. I’m greeted at the door by an eight-foot horse and, just inside, by an even larger floor lamp that towers nearly 10 feet overhead, its bulbs hidden by crinoline. I laugh when I realize the intent-I’m looking up a skirt. Even the store clerks seem to delight in the quirky surroundings: a lifelike pig with a tray on his head, a vase that appears to be made of eggs, or Wanders’s take on the classic Dutch Delft blue pottery-a vase that seems caught in a wind storm, twisted sideways and bleeding paint.
By the time I leave, an hour or so later, a textile market is bustling on Westerstraat out front. I resist the urge to barter for cheap souvenirs-that ubiquitous Delft pottery-and instead head east, east, east to what feels like familiar surroundings. The Eastern Docklands-former shipyards turned artist studios turned yuppie playground-feel downright new (and not unlike Vancouver’s Granville Island) compared to the centuries-old surroundings of downtown Amsterdam. Looser development restrictions mean that new buildings don’t need to blend in-so modern architecture in bold colours and unnatural angles is de rigueur here. No longer surrounded by canals but sea air and wide open spaces, I wander from island to island-former ship docks-and through the granddaddy of the local design stores here: Pol’s Potten, whose owner Erik Pol is credited with the gentrification of the area over a decade ago.

Dutch design isn’t all about Amsterdam, and so I end my journey in The Hague, 50 kilometres down the road. The city better known for UN tribunals has a few gems of its own. From the small but mighty Gemeentemuseum (go throaty on the "ge," then phonetically after that), a stark modernist ode to much-loved local architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage (whose severe design for the museum is either universally loved or hated, depending on who you talk to) to the design district of the Denneweg, it’s worth at least a side trip.

My ultimate destination here is Escher. Any survivor of the ubiquitous university poster sale knows well the mind-trip of the Maurits Cornelis Escher print: the perpetual staircases, the abstracts that turn into birds. And though there’s always something more to witnessing the originals in The Hague’s Escher museum over the three-for-$30 offer when your dorm room needed a little something, the Hans van Bentem chandeliers on display are the scene stealer here. (Rumour has it Madonna purchased a pistol-shaped chandelier for her own abode.) Crafted from thousands of Bohemian crystals, the Rotterdam artist’s works come in the shapes of seahorse, shark, rain cloud and skull-and-crossbones, among others, all dangling from the 18th-century palace that now houses Escher’s weird and wonderful designs.

As I stare at the elaborate creations, it occurs to me that they’re the perfect metaphor for Dutch design today: weird and wonderful, best seen in situ but-like Madonna’s new pistol-packing light fixture-making their way around the world. We may be coming from the same coastal influences, but Dutch designers have taken those rainy-day dreams and, instead of bringing the outdoors in, they’ve cracked a good joke. And if the Moooi horse lamp I spotted in the Joey restaurant in downtown Vancouver is any indication, we all want in on it. wl