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Travel: Dutch by design

Modern interpretations maintain respect for tradition and history in The Netherlands
1529travel
The Belvedere Museum is a slab of basalt on a Dutch bog

“Basically, the Dutch are lazy — they pick something that already exists and abstract it further,” jokes Dutch museum director Erik Schilp at the ZuiderZee Museum in northern Holland.

Schilp is a mover-and-shaker in the process of transforming the 60-year-old ZuiderZee from a one-dimensional open-air museum of fishing and farming culture into a hipper destination that incorporates contemporary culture, design and art.

Schilp is saying, playfully, that modern Dutch design — and it is everywhere in this tiny footprint of a country — is rooted in tradition.

Or, put another way, that rather than jettisoning what has gone before, the best designers incorporate long-honoured craft in a way that is unique and modern.

It was reality I’d appreciate again and again as we drove north from Amsterdam through the provinces of Noord Holland, Fryslân (or Friesland) and back south and east to the province of Gelderland.

In 1932, the Dutch government dammed the north side of the salt-water Zuider Zee (“southern sea”) to create two vast fresh-water “lakes” — one of which is the Ijsselmeer. Around that time, more than 100 historic buildings were relocated to the harbour town of Enkhuizen and reassembled as the ZuiderZee Museum.

For years this collection that includes fishers’ cottages, a functioning bakery, a warehouse selling huge wheels of cheese, steam laundry and a smokehouse where you can sample herring and eel, has drawn hundreds of thousands of mostly Dutch tourists.

However, “the interest in history for history’s sake is declining,” Schilp said, so he invited, for example, the Dutch fashion duo of Viktor and Rolf to put their trendy spin on traditional fishing garb and textiles, and hang their garments in a museum gallery.

Visitors still explore the delightful village, with its Church District, canal, harbour and polder with sheep and windmill. But at the individual houses or shops you’re as likely as not to encounter an exhibit of contemporary graffiti (on a historic theme) or an avant-garde take on traditional Delft pottery.

We dined at an elegant restaurant in Enkhuizen and slept on a ketch moored on the Ijsselmeer. In the morning we headed north on Highway A7 and across the incredible 32-kilometre-long dike (that created the Ijsselmeer) to Friesland.

At the village of Makkum, we pulled up to a “factory” called Royal Tichelaar Makkum. The modern single-storey building looked unassuming, but when we stepped into a large foyer filled with trestle-like tables laden with ceramic objects of art, I knew this place was unusual. The sale items — richly decorative bowls and plates, tiles and sculptures in traditional and contemporary design (and not inexpensive; no souvenir trinkets here) — were invariably knockdown gorgeous.

Tichelaar Makkum began making ornamental earthenware in 1670, though its founding as a brickyard dates to 1594, making it the oldest company in Holland. Today, it is known around the world for exceptional craftsmanship, if not for an ability to keep tradition alive by incorporating modern technology and design. (“Tichelaar takes its long history seriously without being bogged down by it,” says a press release.)

A chic public relations woman explained how Tichelaar’s 70 employees, some of whom have worked here for decades, employ traditional faience (glazing) techniques. Yet the company recently made international news by hiring four contemporary Dutch artists to reinterpret the hugely ostentatious flower “pyramid vases” popular in Holland in the 17 th century. The wildly imaginative contemporary “vases” were on display during our visit (the set can be ordered for 300,000 Euro), before travelling on to New York for an exhibit.

In south-central Friesland, near Heerenveen, in a landscape of wind-blown grasses and rippling water, sits a long slab of layered German black basalt. This is the Belvédère Museum, opened in 2004 and devoted to modern and contemporary Frysian art.

The austere yet striking museum straddles a straight-as-an-arrow canal through what was once a sprawling peat bog. One can imagine the locals cutting and hauling the peat to home or market. Yet at the far end of the canal stands a 17 th century Renaissance-style manor house — just a hint of opulence in a wonderfully stark setting.

The Belvédère Museum was named the most beautiful building in Holland by Dutch architects in 2006. And I had the opportunity to chat briefly with architect Eende Schippers, who said of his building: “This is a dramatic place — open a little bit to the indoors, a little bit to the outdoors.”

While the artists here may not be widely known outside Europe — Jan Mankes, Chris Beekman, Gerrit Benner and Tinus van Doorn among them — most worked in traditions that draw on the likes of van Gogh, Mondriaan, Vermeer and Chagall. Said Schippers: “They liked to do things in a way that was simple, sober and direct. They worked hard. They were Protestant. They liked ordinary things.”

From Friesland, we slipped south again to the province of Gelderland and De Hoge Veluwe National Park. This largest nature reserve in Holland was, from the early 1900s, the private hunting reserve of industrialist Anton Kröller. Today, wild boar, the big-horned moufflon sheep Kröller imported from Corsica and Sardinia, roe deer and other wildlife populate the 5,400-hectare landscape of woods, fen, sand and grasslands.

More than 40 kilometres of cycling paths weave through the park, and bikes are available for free. The park is dotted with historic markers, among them the charming St. Hubertus Hunting Lodge that Kröller had built in a turn-of-the-century art-deco style.

But the jewel in the crown is the Kröller-Müller Museum, located in the park’s centre. This world-class art gallery was planned and developed by Kröller’s wife Helena Müller, a noted art collector of the early 20th century, and for whom it is named.

The Kröller-Müller owns the largest collection of Vincent van Gogh paintings and drawings outside the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. You’ll see crowd-pleasers like Terrace of a café at night , stunning lesser known works, as well as pieces by the likes of Picasso, Renoir, Monet and Mondriaan. The Kröller-Müller also features a notable sculpture garden, with pieces by Henri Moore and others.

So again in The Netherlands, art and design, and old and new, come together in an exotic natural setting. So much for lazy.

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ZuiderZee Museum, www.zuiderzeemuseum.nl

Royal Tichelaar Makkum, www.tichelaar.nl

De Hoge Veluwe National Park, www.hogeveluwe.nl