Boutique hotel · Noordwijkerhout · Interior design
The location
De Duinrand stands where the dunes give way to the bulb fields, on the edge of Noordwijkerhout. It is a stretch of the Netherlands that changes colour twice a year, and a hotel here has to hold its own against that without competing with it.
A new-build hotel in Noordwijkerhout, between the dunes and the bulb fields, with thirty-nine rooms. Commissioned by Patrick Damen of Chronos Vastgoed, with architecture by Van Maanen. I designed the interior.
The design
With thirty-nine rooms the risk is repetition, so I let the building itself decide: full-height rooms on the lower floors, and rooms tucked under the roof slope with a dormer and their own sitting corner. Every room has an upholstered headboard running the full width of the wall, a bespoke desk and generous wardrobes, so that a single night and a full week both feel considered.
The same thinking runs through the public areas. A guest arriving late should find somewhere to sit that is not the bar, and somewhere to work that is not the room. Those in-between places are what decide whether a hotel of this size still feels personal.
Colours and materials
A soft, muted palette: sage green against warm off-white, herringbone oak floors and joinery in walnut. Brushed brass details give the rooms their warmth after dark. In the bathrooms I set a hand-textured green tile against pale stone, so that even the smallest room has something worth looking at.
The palette is taken from what is outside: the grey-green of dune grass, the sand, the pale light that comes off the sea. Nothing shouts. The materials are chosen to look better after a few years than on the first day.
A room you would choose rather than be given.
In my own words
With thirty-nine rooms the temptation is to design one and copy it thirty-eight times. I did the opposite and let the building decide, so a room under the roof slope became a different room, not a lesser one. No guest should feel they were given what was left over.
— Mariska Jagt
