Talk 6: What my father's hands taught me about beauty

 

My father loved antiques. He bought them, and when they needed it, he repaired them himself. He was good with wood, truly skilled, the kind of person who looks at a broken thing and already sees his hands putting it right.

 

I spent hours with him as a child, talking, watching, pottering around in the garage. He was my favourite person in the world — him, and the horse he gave me, which I went to take care of every day. Family, horse, school. That was my childhood.

 

He and my mum nearly opened an antique shop. In the end, they chose a grocery store instead, and I think it was the right call. People need food every single day, and that gave our family something steady. But in his free time, the antiques never left him. He bought old houses and repaired them, and sometimes, inside the walls or down in a cellar, he'd find something unexpected — once, an entire cellar full of antique blue tiles. He took me to auctions when he could. I was watching, even then, without knowing what it would become.

 

Years later, after art school, I became close with Frederique, who ran a brocante store in Amsterdam. She is a stylist, a shopkeeper, and an art historian, and she was the first person outside my family to really see my eye for styling and tell me so.

 

We became devoted to thrift stores too, visiting them often, still, with my mother. In the town near where she lives, there are two in particular. The area is wealthy, so what people bring in is often extraordinary — the highest quality pieces, made by hand, by people who knew their craft.

 

That's exactly what I didn't want to let go of. The knowledge in an original piece — a couch, a side table, a vase, a cupboard, a desk — is something you simply cannot buy new. It's already lived a life. Giving it another one, inside an office I'm restyling, feels like the most honest kind of beauty there is.

 

So now, when I transform a space, the plants come in, and so does the furniture, vintage or antique, depending on what that particular office calls for. Nothing about it is generic. Every piece has already been somewhere, and it's about to go somewhere again.