A Dutch Afternoon.
Afternoon tea arrives from England, in someone else's porcelain. The brief was to send it back out speaking Dutch. It is not a fixed menu — it is a format, and a strict one: many pieces, tight timing, and a room that expects a certain thing, which is how it turns decorative so easily. Three times a year the hotel remakes it around whoever it is working with. It has to say something new without becoming something else, and it has to come out of the kitchen the same way every service. Same format, another chapter.
Scope
Client
Duration
Year
Costed recipes · Written methods and SOPs · Seasonal framework · Mould development · Team training
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01
(01)
Where it started
De L'Europe Amsterdam has stood on the Amstel since 1896, where the river meets the Rokin: a national monument, family-owned, one of the few hotels in the world with three MICHELIN Keys. The house calls itself the home of original Amsterdam luxury, and it means all three words — heritage, contemporary, luxurious. They wanted an afternoon tea that said exactly that, out loud. So we built it from the same material: the city outside their windows, starting with the canal house. Menu, pieces, story, moulds and tools — all of it ours to make.
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02
(02)
What we designed
An Amsterdam canal house cast in chocolate that opens to a red fruit centre — the façade of the city served on a plate, in the hotel that has watched it from the water for more than a century. Slices marbled by hand, so no two pieces leave the kitchen the same. Every element designed to sit on the hotel's own porcelain rather than compete with it — the plate was already part of the story, we just gave it something to hold.
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03
(03)
It changes with every collaboration
Sisters Janssen
De L'Europe keeps a wing called 't Huys — the house — a collection of suites, each one designed with a different Amsterdam artist. One of them is Sisters Janssen's: a room the sister duo built around the divine feminine, in their own colour, drawing and sculpture. The season began with a visit to that room. We did not leave with a brief, we left with a palette: the colours, the images, the shapes standing in the corners. Their painting moved onto the back of the chocolate house. A piece of their furniture became a mould for a watermelon lolly. And because it was summer the tea was iced — so the ice was designed too: The Body, the sculpture that stands in the suite, and the lips that keep returning in their work, both cast to melt into the glass.
Event photographs: Orlando Pitaro →
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(03)
The Devil Wears Prada
De L'Europe hosted Disney for the Amsterdam premiere, and the afternoon tea was rebuilt around three objects everyone in that room would recognise: the cerulean sweater, Miranda's glasses and the heel. Each one was drawn, 3D printed, moulded and cast — the sweater came out of a silicone tray we made for it, six at a time. They ended up hanging on the façade of the canal house, with the glasses underneath.
Three chapters a year. Two of them are here.
Latest Projects.
More of what we have made.
