Mood masters: an artful home in Amsterdam

Three golden rhinestones, the kind you might find on a child’s homemade crown, are stuck next to the doorbell. At the top of the stairs, Dax Roll greets me and ushers me down a corridor into a kitchen, where sparkly golden foil frames the doorway. Both details are remnants of recent celebrations, the designer explains: from a team Christmas drink, and his partner Joyce Urbanus’s 40th birthday party. Their daughter is delighted that the decorations have been left up (she’s going through a gold and glitter phase). Urbanus, too, confesses a love for sparkles – although you might not guess it from her work.

Partners in life and business, Urbanus and Roll set up the Amsterdam-based interior design studio Nicemakers in 2011. They’ve since carved a niche as one of Europe’s go-to firms for warm, sophisticated interiors and curated furniture choices. Hotels and homes are their main trade – they made a splash in 201 4 5 with the Hoxton in the Dutch capital, and led the renovation of the historic five-star De L’Europe Amsterdam hotel in 2021 – but over the years they’ve also tackled restaurants and retail spaces.

The couple and their daughter moved into this first-floor flat in central Amsterdam around three years ago, following the company’s relocation to a new HQ, a nearby space that now houses their 12-strong team. “We always live within walking distance of our studio,” Roll explains, his hands cradling a cup of coffee as he leans against the gold-fringed doorframe. He and Urbanus usually like to renovate “from top to bottom,” he continues. But they’ve made only superficial changes here, largely because the bare bones were already in place when they moved in. “The kitchen was here, the floor was here, we didn’t even paint,” Roll says. “We just added our layer of furniture, decoration and art.”

Some of the apartment’s most striking features are in the living room, which has tall south-facing windows crowned with beautiful stained-glass panels, overlooking a broad square. The trees are bare now, letting in the low winter light, but in summer they’re lush with leaves. “You feel as if you’re living in the trees,” says Roll. I admire a window seat, perfectly nestled in a niche. “That’s the best spot in the house,” he smiles, adding that it’s one of the few things they had custom-built. Otherwise, to make the flat their own, they assembled some of their favourite pieces from a vast trove of collected furniture, and scoured vintage and antiques shops to find perfectly dimensioned pieces.

In a nutshell, this is the Nicemakers’ origin story. Urbanus and Roll started out as collectors, and this is still how they like to work. Whenever they take on a new project, the first step is always consulting the long list of catalogued items they have in storage. You can always spot a Nicemakers project from their signature mix of vintage, bespoke and new pieces.

They’re always on the hunt for rare and unusual designs, often travelling with an extra trunk to transport their finds back home. The cabinets flanking the classical fireplace in the living room, for instance, were originally sourced from an antiques dealer in Italy. Among Urbanus’s favourite items, they’re a matching pair but with different interiors, one with slender drawers and the other with shelves. “They have Gio Ponti features,” says Urbanus, but she doesn’t know who the original designer was. Everything here is chosen by eye, she says, not by name. Sure, the living room boasts a coveted lacquered bamboo coffee table by the Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt, but she and Roll weren’t aware of this when they picked it up in Paris.

Other highlights were bought closer to home. Countless walks with her then-newborn baby took Urbanus past a shabby second-hand shop in Amsterdam, where two framed photographs kept catching her eye. They now hang in the master bedroom, matching its muted palette. She bought them without knowing that they were the work of Ernst Yperlaan, a well-known Dutch landscape photographer. After getting in touch with him, she was pleased that the pictures were taken in Spain, a country she is very fond of. Indeed she and Roll have recently bought a house in Menorca after falling in love with the island while designing a project there.

Above those cabinets in the living room hang paintings by the Dutch artist San Ming, a longstanding Nicemakers collaborator who hosts invitation-only sales twice a year in his Amsterdam apartment. Ming also made the large metal mobile hanging from the ceiling in the centre of the room, where you might expect to see a pendant light. Evenings and winter mornings here are lived largely by candlelight, Urbanus explains. The gentle warmth from the flames often sets the mobile spinning gracefully overhead, giving it what she calls a “mystical quality”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Roll and Urbanus have strong feelings about lighting. Bad lighting can ruin a room’s atmosphere in an instant, Urbanus says, shuddering as she recalls the “terrible” lighting in a Los Angeles hotel suite they recently stayed in. To avoid this, the couple actually travel with their own candles and low-wattage incandescent bulbs (they’re no fans of LEDs) to infuse their temporary homes with a golden glow.

These masters of mood are proof that taste is as much about instinct as knowledge. From the space itself to the pieces within it, for them it comes down to a simple question: does it feel good? They don’t adhere to strict rules and are happy to challenge conventions, for example the notion that different woods shouldn’t be mixed (they use at least eight varieties in their own living room).

“When you choose things that make you happy, they just go together,” Urbanus says, perched cross-legged on the window seat. “That’s what this home is. We haven’t overthought anything. We didn’t make a mood board. We didn’t measure. It was very loose and organic.” Roll nods in agreement: “It shouldn’t be too perfect, right?”