A Dutch Afternoon.
Afternoon tea arrives from England, in someone else's porcelain. The brief was to send it back out speaking Dutch.
Scope
Client
Duration
Year
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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
The afternoon tea is not a fixed menu. It is a format, and a way of communicating: three times a year the hotel remakes it around whoever it is working with, and the experience says something new without becoming something else. Same format, another chapter.
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.
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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.
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