For lovers of contemporary design, The Frozen Fountain is an inspiring space filled with furniture and objects from the weird to the wonderful and much in between. There are various rooms that are laid out with large innovative pieces. This furntiure is, unfortunately, never going to grace my appartment as it is way too expensive,…
I always describe Reypenaer cheese as the kind of cheese that Dutch people buy each other for Christmas. Reypenaer is a cheese company run by the Wyngaard family and they ripen cheese in an old fashioned way and produce an exceptionally high quality end product. There are 2 vital elements to this, first, to buy…
Kaashuis Tromp (Tromp Cheese House) is a family cheese business started by Toon Tromp who began delivering milk, cheese and eggs in the early 1960s and then switched to a market stall so there was less legwork and his customers could come to him. 3 of his 8 children, Peter, Wim and Roel, were also…
This is an old favorite of mine, one of the nicest and most welcoming ‘brown cafes’ of Amsterdam. It is right on the Nieuwmarkt Square and really is a local hangout. I love the way that the floor slopes, this is from subsidence and has not been corrected like sloping floors have been in most…
A tulip grows from a bulb. You need to plant the bulb before the end of October (Norhtern hemisphere) so that it spend the winter underground and pop up…
People often ask how the city deals with dead bikes. By dead bikes I mean bikes that are locked in a public place with no apparent owner. There are a lot of bikes in Amsterdam. The figure that does the rounds is that there are about 1 million bikes owned by the 800 thousand…
Amsterdam houses tend to be quite narrow. But sometimes this narrowness is taken to extremes! Which is the narrowest depends on how you define narrow. Do you take into account only the width of the facade? Does it matter if the house widens away from the street. I think so.
Nice restaurants provide a free carafe of tap water on request. This is how the conversation goes: Waiter: Would you like water? You: Yes please. Waiter: Still or with gas? (Almost tricking you into ordering a bottle.) You: Tap water will be perfect thank you, I hear you have wonderful tap water here, I’ve been…
Early spring is tulip time and a fantastic time of year to visit Holland. Keukenhof Gardens is an extravaganza of shapes and colours of tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, orchids, lilies, cherry blossom, apple blossom, wisteria, and a whole lot more too! If you visit Amsterdam in April you really must visit Keukenhof Gardens. People often ask…
