In the old fishing village of Durgerdam, a heritage inn on the IJmeer has been restored into a 14-room stay with an honesty bar, a herb garden and a kitchen that draws almost entirely from the farms next door.
The cobblestones begin before the water does. Off the motorway from the airport the road narrows to a single lane, bumping past a row of traditional Dutch fishing houses, boats tied to their moorings on the other side.
I was running late. A delayed flight at the end of a week in the Nordics had me texting apologies to Megan Wyper, a fellow New Zealander and recent Amsterdam transplant, who wrote back that she was managing fine with a strawberry spritz, some bread and a breeze off the lake. De Durgerdam was already sounding like the right place to land.
Check-in had been handled online, so rather than keep my dinner guest waiting I dropped my bag and crossed to the jetty, where dinner at De Mark, the restaurant, ran to four courses of local food as the last light left the water. Later I discovered a fisherman’s drink in my room: the tiny bottle with a handwritten note, pure Drink Me. No rabbit hole followed, just the best sleep of the trip.
The calm is deliberate. The building went up in 1664 as an inn for sailors and fishermen, its pale weatherboard front once standing out to boats that could moor right at the door, back when the water beyond was open sea. In one form or another it’s done that work ever since; the original staircase by the door, worn down its centre, is protected now and stays exactly as it is.
“We call it unfussy luxury,” says Stijn Soolsma, general manager at De Durgerdam. “Everything you touch and see should be very sensory, nothing stiff or difficult.” The renovation ran that down to the foundations with the technology hidden behind a traditional aesthetic, where the rooms are made to feel lived-in.
Tiles from Royal Tichelaar, one of the country’s oldest working potteries, turn up in the bathrooms, the bar and underfoot. Buro Belén, the Amsterdam-based design studio founded by Brecht Duijf and Lenneke Langenhuijsen, oversaw the interiors, working cloud shapes into the paint and small fish into the finishes, and hung art tied to the village, one piece dating to 1645 and catalogued in a book you can read in your room.
The kitchen cooks to the seasons and mostly to Europe, straying only for what the continent can’t grow, like coffee. Herbs come from the garden: tarragon with the scrambled eggs, lemon balm in a drink, lavender pressed into oil. One night paired morels and gnocchi with cheese from a goat farm south of Amsterdam that Stijn visited as a child. “Now we’re serving cheese from the same goats I grew up with,” says Stijn. “We tell the story at the table, and people say that’s where I’m off to tomorrow.”
Going tomorrow is encouraged. With a hand-drawn map and an electric bike, guests get pointed past the harbour to farm stalls selling eggs, berries, kefir and cheese you pay for by phone, or on to the old fishing towns of Marken and Monnickendam. I had the dedicated cycle trail largely to myself, rolling through farmland to Holysloot, a one-street village with charm to spare, then home past traditional cottages and the odd sharp modern build.
Back at the house, an honesty bar stands in for minibars, with a chess set and a shelf of books for anyone landing jet-lagged and in no hurry. The team don’t divide into departments; whoever checks you in might also cook your breakfast and wheel out your bike. About 40 per cent of guests are Dutch, plenty out from Amsterdam for a single night, new parents among them claiming 24 hours to themselves.
The 14 rooms sit across the main house and an 18th-century building in the garden, worked in deep, earthy tones and kept soft rather than sharp. Blackout curtains hold off the long summer evening, and on a cooler night the downstairs nook, fire lit, is where you’d end up. Out the back, past the herb beds, a hidden bench faces west across a canal to the sun going down behind the city.
I fell into conversation there with a local couple in from the city for a swim and dinner. When residents and visitors want the same thing from a place, it’s usually doing something right. It’s a rare thing to arrive somewhere late and flustered and leave having done, quite deliberately, almost nothing.
Words Alice Lines
Photography Chantal Arnts and Studio Unfolded
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