Marcel Wanders/KLM collaboration, via Design.NL

As a little pick-me-up, I bought a cheerful new MAC lipstick recently, designed by Dutch wonder-designer Marcel Wanders. I liked the look of the lipstick tube itself, which resembles a turned wooden leg of a table.

Which leads me to the pleasing setup above, also from Meneer Wanders–the business-class table setting of KLM. Evidently, this has been a project of his for some time. It’s lovely, with the so-Dutch-seeming scalloped edges that instantly remind you that you’re not on US Airways.

An excerpt from the interview with him:

This type of project has always been an interest for me. People think I just design sofas. But we did biodegradable sets a long time ago — the first for the airline industry. And some time ago, I made the lightest and best stackable cup in the world. It’s this kind of thing no one knows about. It’s invisible work. I don’t even have an image of this cup because it’s just a cup. But these ideas have been near to me all the time.

It’s very difficult. It’s a very technical project. But you have to make it so it doesn’t look technical, so it just feels like, ‘Wow, we’re in a nice restaurant.’ What we designed for them is something which is beautifully calm.

“Beautifully calm.” That is exactly the experience I want out of every flight. Exactly. Like the blissful ignorance that anyone else is staying in the same hotel as you are and extra space before boarding a flight, a beautifully calm flight experience is an unbelievable luxury, and I love that someone’s designing with that in mind.

Also, it’s great that the cutlery and plates themselves are so lightweight and therefore saving on fuel. So practische. (The way the press release is written is just so Dutch–proud of itself for being so efficient and clever, but trying not to seem that way.)

Not that I’ll ever likely wind up using it, since business-class seats are a squinch out of my price range, but I like knowing that it’s there. More of this kind of thing, please, airlines of the world.

Something about fall makes me want to be surrounded by piles of beautiful books. Books are the best way to dream about places to visit, aren’t they?

My fall list includes re-reading Alledaags, which I bought in the Netherlands this summer. It’s written by a Kiwi illustrator who put an image to each day of a year in Amsterdam. Check out the samples. It’s funny, clever, and true. What could be better?

The rest of my fall reading list after the jump.

I’ve already written about how much I love the work of Alain de Botton, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I went to the bookstore last night, after I found out yesterday that he had a new book.

I’ve already finished half of A Week at the Airport, a slim 100-page treatise at being the writer-in-residence at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5. Yes, seriously.

De Botton is the single best observer of the nuances of travel living today. Period. Whereas most writers fall into cutesy traps (example A here), his perspective is more philosophical and melancholy–more like what it can actually be like to travel.

Some favorite passages.

On the airport Sofitel:

After dinner, it was still warm and not yet quite dark outside. I would have liked to take a walk around one of the few fields that remained of the farmland on which the airport had been built some six decades before, but it seemed at once perilous and impossible to leave the building, so I decided to do a few circuits around the hotel corridors instead. Feeling disoriented and queasy, as if I were on a cruise ship in a swell, I repeatedly had to steady myself against the synthetic walls.

More cheerily, on the departures board:

Nowhere was the airport’s charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities. The lack of detail about the destinations served only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, St Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Grand Cayman via Nassau…all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation.

Can’t wait to read the rest.

I’m doing a lot of heavy-duty reading for work, so the other two books on my list are really picture books, to give my brain some breathing space: The Japanese Gardens: Kyoto, because I am obsessed with getting there, hopefully next year, and a book still in its pleasing plastic wrapper, Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower.

A few samples from it are here.

One sample–with a pinkish coloration it doesn’t have in real life–is here:

copyright antimuseum.online.fr

For the end of design week, I wanted to share this great homemade-design blog I recently came across, Vlijtig. As previously mentioned in this post, one of the reasons I wanted to learn Dutch this year is because I love their aesthetic and wanted to be able to read Dutch design magazines.

I’m not there yet, and so, thank heavens for blogs like Vlijtig that help me make sense of it all. According to her blog, this image above is from an art project that involves giving compliments to people. 

My compliment of the day is how much I love this blog.

P.S. I did have to cheat to translate the saying above, but I got surprisingly close (confusing “root” and “carrot,” though, which made it inexplicable). I think it basically translates to something like: where you would build, get to the roots.

P.P.S. I love the “ij” in Dutch. If you want to say it, pronounce it like a “y”: Vlytig, meaning “industrious,” another admirable Dutch quality.

1. It’s fantastic.

2. It fits in with design week here on newelty.
3. We were lucky enough to snag Genna’s time to do our own redesign of newelty after this was originally posted in February!

I spent today out in the bright sun on my Dutch bike. I was able to bike through downtown Seattle in weather so nice that it was warm enough to wear just my skinny jeans and my Little Edie tee–a revolutionary costume of the day in Februrary!

After ignoring the internets all day, I came home to see not only was one of my favorite sites Copenhagen Cycle Chic now also on Twitter, but that this artist, Genna Campton, had created the incredible illustration you see above as an homage to that site.

I now have a new goal for newelty, some day in the far, far future.

A slight variation of my image of Venice: canals, quaintness, lightposts. Plus bikes. The postcard image of Holland.

And don’t get me wrong. That’s charming, and I love that the picture I took was just an average day in Haarlem, nothing special. There is a beauty to the Dutch way of life that’s undeniable.

But when I talk about loving the Dutch design aesthetic, what I mean is a spectrum that includes the crazy modern stuff like the kind Droog creates. I actually have a set of these bikes straps to use in your house. I have no idea what I’ll use them for, mind you, but I just love the idea of taking something so practical and making it a design element on the wall. Plus, hello novelty!

One of the things that I think makes Dutch design unique is that it has to be understandable by so many types of people from so many other lands. This started during the Golden Age of trading, but Amsterdam today reflects their multicultural past in so many tiny ways, like this crossing sign designed so that absolutely anyone can understand what the hell that button is for:

In the U.S., when I think about spaces that have to be used by every kind of person, the word beige comes to mind: Beige hotel rooms. Beige walls. I’m partly design obsessed right now because I’m looking for a new house, and the common denominator seems to be to take everything down to a nice taupe. Think of the redesign of the Oval Office–bland, beige, non-threatening. What’s the point?

I try to imagine Americans picking these orange striped blinds for their house, and I just can’t.

When I was in the Netherlands, I made a commitment to do what I saw so often there–put a little table and chairs, or better yet, a bench, in the front of my house. It’s so friendly and so cheerful. I think, like the way the Dutch embrace color, it signifies something larger–a willingness to engage with the street, with passers-by.

Not always of course, but the Dutch seem to be to be often brave in their design choices–with color, with functionality, and with the ability for people to interact with each other and with the daily life that hums along on the street.

Most guidebooks that cover the Netherlands really only cover Holland, and to be honest, really only cover Amsterdam. Den Bosch isn’t on the tourist map, which is why ignoring guidebooks completely was such a good idea for this trip. I booked my week-long rental via Google Maps, and it turned out to be the nicest place I had ever stayed.

The apartment is so pretty, a photo tour is in order. I took so many because I hope to have my house look like this some day! I am in love with Dutch design, and this place had all the elements that make it seem both fresh, modern, and classic. When I walked in and saw this living room, I was instantly happy:

Plenty more photos of this fab Dutch apartment after the jump.

The apartment has a kitchen nook, dining room, living room, and two bedrooms. What the what?!? I couldn’t believe it. It was also about $100 a night because I was staying for a week. Talk about a goedkoep.

View of the beautiful trees in the courtyard outside:

The owners were on vacation, so their upstairs neighbors took care of me while I was there. They were so friendly, and helped me practice my Dutch. The husband, Tony, explained that the house used to be an old brewery 300+ years ago, hence the beautiful wide-slat wood floors:

I loved how the TV was almost an afterthought, instead of a giant flatscreen. It was nice that they had it, though, to watch the World Cup on.

My little fridge was restocked with an incredible number of treats, including the Dutch sprinkles you put on toast. Yum.

I actually never slept in this bed:

I chose this one, which was more tucked in to a little nook (and therefore quieter, darker, and more gezellig):

The nighttime reading I have there, by the way, is Dutch Ditz: Manners in the Netherlands, which came in such handy while I was there. I picked it up at one of my favorite bookstores in the world.

Because this was such an old building, the second bedroom and bathroom had been tucked into a space that had been created to divide up these beautiful, huge rooms. While I was showering, I noticed this window (and air vent) that showed how truly tall the floors really were:

I also liked that the bathtub had astroturf next to it. Quirky design thing that you’d only see in a hipster house in the US:

If you want to do something like this yourself, wherever you’re headed, I can’t recommend it enough. Here’s how:

Go to Google Maps. Enter your location and a phrase like “hotel” or “B&B”. Here’s the search results for “B&B near Den Bosch, Nederland”:

View Larger Map

The truth is that my first choice had been “bed and breakfast Achter de Kan,” which shows up in this map. But that place was booked that week. So then I just googled “Achter de Kan B&B,” to find somewhere similar, which led me to this awesome list, which included a listing for In de Witte Laars. If it’s good enough for the Dutchies, I figured, it’s good enough for me!

I did the same thing with my time in Texel–using Google maps to find a place–and had fantastic results. Because then, having already seen a Street View of the place, I had a sense when I was near the right spot. Aren’t the interwebs incredible?

I zoomed around the city, using Street View to see this this place was in the heart of the town.

In general, while I was there, I just felt incredibly lucky–lucky to have found this place, lucky to be able to stay there for a whole week, and lucky to be surrounded by such style and elegance.

I searched the Google maps nearby towns looking for a B&B, and mapped out my route using Google street view. It looked like the total commute time by bike would be 30 minutes, 45 tops. After my freakout about how it would work and my test drive in Delft, I found out that the Netherlands really makes biking easy, no matter where you are.

Video of my daily ride after the jump.

I’m hoping the cute song makes the bumpiness charming, rather than nauseating.

I live in Seattle, and we have nothing like this. We have someone who seems to be an ineffectual mayor (my skeptical friend nicknamed him Mayor McCheese). He actually complimented my own Dutch bike when I saw him in my neighborhood, which is nice. But what would be nicer is a plan for a real biking infrastructure like the kind in this tiny town in the Netherlands, so small it barely has a wikipedia entry. Does this plan exist already? I don’t think so. And if not, Mayor McGinn, could you create  it? Because the video above shows how fantastically great that was for many reasons.

In case you want to enjoy some much-more-professional videos (sans rockiness and something on the lens), try out these favorites sites that always inspire:

• Cycle Chic
• Amsterdamize
• Let’s Go Ride a Bike

This morning, I was thinking about how much fun it was to be in Holland during the World Cup, and I was feeling a little sentimental about it. So with that in mind, I pulled up these videos to the theme songs for the 2010 World Cup.

These two songs below were in constant rotation during my trip. When I say that these were everywhere, I mean it: On every commercial break, playing from every corner shop, on the sound system of ever eetcafe, booming from every car that went past. Normally, this kind of thing drives me nuts. I can’t justify or excuse it–these songs just reminds me of this recent trip and how interesting it was to be there during the World Cup. If you’re having one of those Wednesdays, I suggest you watch to see if one of these videos doesn’t lift your mood.

This is a fun video of the most omnipresent song during this time, reworked with vintage footage by an African TV station.

Along with the incredible goals, I also just enjoy scenes of fans losing their minds. Fun.

Even though I’m definitely not a Shakira fan, I find it hard to be in a bad mood when I hear this song.

If you read my previous post (How Zen Is Citizen M?), you probably want to know the answer to the following question:

OK, how was it staying in a hotel room with a toilet in the middle of the room?

But hold on a second–there’s more to the story of the Citizen M.

When I checked in to the Amsterdam branch of the hotel, it wasn’t a good first start. I had made a reservation for the previous week, but had to cancel it. Unfortunately, they canceled BOTH reservations, and had no record of me in their system when I showed up for second reservation. Things were shaping up to be a fail.

In that way that sometimes happens, where computers actually make things less convenient, the front desk staff (who have no front desk, so actually seem like they’re just hanging out in the front), told me to go on the free computers, make an online reservation, and then come back. By the time all of this got straightened out and I made it upstairs, I was overheated and grumpy.

Then I encountered the hallway, which seemed to be a width of about six feet:

It actually made me feel both nauseous and claustrophobic. I realized those doors were frighteningly close together. Oh, my god. What the hell is this?

And note: This is all before I encountered the toilet-room.

When I arrived in the room, the shades were drawn. Because they were automatic (and run by the in-room computer), I couldn’t figure out how to open them. I was trapped in an airless, artificially-lit six-foot-wide box.

Out of a little bit of panic, I started playing with the remote control below, which was strapped to the wall. I freed it, and started button-mashing.

After having the room change color six times, I finally got the hang of it and opened the blinds. It felt a little ridiculous to have to wade through four screens of information as if I was setting up an Xbox in order to get my hotel room to work. Hotel rooms probably shouldn’t require a technical manual.

But then I stumbled on the intro video at the top of this blog post, and was won over. The light was pouring in (at last), the giant room-sized bed was comfortable, and I was charmed by the simplicity of the layout. Everything in the small space was right where it should be: The side table for the bed was at the right height. In short, the room was gezellig (cozy) and downright fantastic, and not at all like other hotels that try too hard to be cool and fail to be comfortable.

And since I know you’re dying to know, as it turns out, the toilet thing is pretty darn weird, but since I was staying there by myself, perfectly fine:

Here’s the deal with the toilet. I would totally stay at this hotel again with someone else, because the room itself is great and the hotel is hyper-convenient to the south train station (it’s literally a three-block walk and 10 minute ride to Schiphol Airport). But during bio breaks, we’d take turns enjoying the luxurious, wi-fi-full downstairs lobby. Just keeping it real.

And that claustrophobic hallway turned out to be one of my favorite features. As someone who requires quiet for a hotel to be successful, this was a huge win. Because people have to walk single-file, it was quiet out there. No one giggling and partying their way from the elevator to their room, kicking over last night’s room service. Tight spaces–like fences–make for good neighbors.

You got to give it to the Citizen M: It’s definitely the most novelty-filled hotel room in existence. It might not be great if you’re craving familiarity. But now that I’ve read the manual and am a power-user, I can heartily endorse (and will visit again).

But I did look over at one point, as the room was changing colors, and thought that it looks like I was getting ready to be beamed up (and, no, the only thing I might have been high on is the cold medicine I was taking at the time):

That’s the shower stall in the foreground, and the toilet in the back. Yes, the toilet has its own lighting, too.

From within the shower stall, I stared up at the rain-water shower head and figured it out:

The M in Citizen M stands for mothership. As in, beam me up, please.

What the hell am I doing? Who studies Dutch…for fun?

And did I also mention it cost thousands of dollars?

I had plotted out the route to the school the night before, winding my way through a series of wrong turns and construction zones until I found a reasonable path and knew that it would take me roughly thirty minutes to get there.

But the bigger question remained: Why wasn’t I on a beach somewhere, rather than heading to a classroom at 8 in the morning?

The night before, lying in bed, I thought: Maybe I’ve hit my novelty wall. Maybe going to a town you’ve never been to, to speak a language in the most intensive immersion environment possible, is actually beyond the pale. Maybe it was actually a bad idea.

Flipping through Facebook to distract myself from a rising tide of panic, I clicked on a piece posted by a friend. She liked this fascinating article on how rough it is to parent from New York magazine. It spoke to my exact thoughts about this adventure I was about to start the next day: Maybe doing something only for fun isn’t the point. Maybe it’s actually possible to have a difficult thing bring you happiness, or at least contentment.

Consider this excerpt:

But for many of us, purpose is happiness—particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with. Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has always taken the view that happiness is best defined in the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end, isn’t by how much fun we had, but what we did with it.

People ask me how it went at language school, and I struggle to give a simple answer. It was 11 hours of mental bootcamp. My brain got mushy around the edges. I’m still working out how to talk about it on this blog. And yet it was experience I will remember for my whole life, and it made my life the better for it.

So another article about happiness in today’s New York Times was especially relevant to me as I sort all this out. The piece by Stephanie Rosenbloom, titled “But Will It Make You Happy?” talks about what kind of purchases add to our longer-term happiness:

“One major finding is that spending money for an experience — concert tickets, French lessons, sushi-rolling classes, a hotel room in Monaco — produces longer-lasting satisfaction than spending money on plain old stuff.

‘It’s better to go on a vacation than buy a new couch’ is basically the idea,” says Professor Dunn, summing up research by two fellow psychologists, Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich. Her own take on the subject is in a paper she wrote with colleagues at Harvard and the University of Virginia: “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It Right.” (The Journal of Consumer Psychology plans to publish it in a coming issue.)

Thomas DeLeire, an associate professor of public affairs, population, health and economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, recently published research examining nine major categories of consumption. He discovered that the only category to be positively related to happiness was leisure: vacations, entertainment, sports and equipment like golf clubs and fishing poles.

Using data from a study by the National Institute on Aging, Professor DeLeire compared the happiness derived from different levels of spending to the happiness people get from being married. (Studies have shown that marriage increases happiness.)

“A $20,000 increase in spending on leisure was roughly equivalent to the happiness boost one gets from marriage,” he said, adding that spending on leisure activities appeared to make people less lonely and increased their interactions with others.

That said–and not to put too fine a point on it–but these happiness studies often seem to recommend a life spent living in a yurt, not enjoying Prada’s 2010 orange lipstick, for example. As someone who continues to find happiness in a yellow hard-sided suitcase, I was glad to see the point made, that it doesn’t have to be either-or, as well:

Spending money on an event, like camping or a wine tasting with friends, leaves people less likely to compare their experiences with those of others — and, therefore, happier.

Of course, some fashion lovers beg to differ. For many people, clothes will never be more than utilitarian. But for a certain segment of the population, clothes are an art form, a means of self-expression, a way for families to pass down memories through generations. For them, studies concluding that people eventually stop deriving pleasure from material things don’t ring true.

“No way,” says Hayley Corwick, who writes the popular fashion blog Madison Avenue Spy. “I could pull out things from my closet that I bought when I was 17 that I still love.”

She rejects the idea that happiness has to be an either-or proposition. Some days, you want a trip, she says; other days, you want a Tom Ford handbag.

Interesting stuff, especially for the travel-minded, I think.