Coming Home - by Barbara de Vries (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Barbara de Vries's Coming Home is a visual feast of wildly beautiful interiors crafted with originality and ingenuity. Each and every one has a fascinating narrative that enriches the wonderful photography, bringing you that much deeper into private worlds, which I find completely inspiring. This is a book of interiors that couldn't be more in sync with our times."--Wendy Goodman, Design Editor of New York Magazine

"It's all too rare, and such a treat, to have a window into a culture from an insider with the perspective of an outsider. Barbara has had the distance to identify what is truly unique to the Dutch, and the lifelong connections to find this lovely mix of creatives with inspiring, thoughtful, and hopeful stories. Coming Home is a great playbook as we're all looking for ways to reinvent our spaces--and just as hygge suddenly became a part of our vocabulary years ago,
I think this book will do that for gezellig."--Yolanda Edwards, Founder and Creative Director of Yolo Journal

"In Coming Home, Barbara de Vries offers a joyful picture of contemporary Dutch domestic life. In these homes--many of which are agricultural or industrial buildings that were repurposed by
their creative owners, among them architects, designers, and artists--a sense of exuberance characterizes the interiors. Some are elegantly spare, while others are filled with art, furniture,
and objects, but unlike so many interiors today, there is nothing studied or precious about these spaces. They are full of meaning and heart, and speak volumes about their owners'
personalities and passions."--Pilar Viladas, Design Writer and Editor

"Think warm colours, flattering lighting, lots of books, plants, knick-knacks -- Scandi minimalism this is not." --THE SUNDAY TIMES

"The large, open space that defines Petra Janssen and Edwin Vollebergh's home is divided by a recycled glass wall designed by Piet Hein Eek." --W MAGAZINE

"Be it a charming canal house, a hyper-contemporary residence, or a humble houseboat, the Dutch have always had a special relationship with their homes and a nonchalant ease when it comes to decorating them. This book invites you inside some of the Netherlands' most inspiring." --ELLE DECOR

"We love how diverse the types of dwellings are...barns, train stations, windmills, an old garage..." --HOW TO DECORATE

"I was entranced with the images, the beautiful photography and then the text, which is a delicate treatise on how to live. With warmth and personality, it celebrates comfort and joy." - Cathleen McGuigan, Architectural Record

"This photographic portfolio and accompanying texts detail how the creative Dutch community has invented a truly unique lifestyle and ways for building and decorating." --WORLD HOPE FORUM

About the Author

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.