Grand design

Author and stylist Helma Bongenaar fell in love with this 18th-century former dockers' bar in Amsterdam, transforming it with repurposed materials, found objects and treasured collections

- HANNAH NEWTON

Helma at her home in Amsterdam. The large, shopfront windows were made in the 1880s when this building was built as a dockers' bar.

'I am very blue,' says Helma. I like the idea of creating a grand old interior and using all blues to allow it to fit together. Helma collects everything from china and silverware to French coffee cups, brass jelly moulds and Champagne coupes. The white lamps are from the 1920s and were the original shop window lights. The chairs are Thonet and have been collected from thrift stores and flea markets over the years. The second-hand table was found online.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the home of author and artist Helma Bongenaar and her husband Jeroen Alberts is the very definition of this old adage. Built in 1880, their modest Amsterdam townhouse was originally a bar for the local dockers. Helma and Jeroen discovered it 23 years ago, when it was a government-subsidized home for artists to access affordable studio space in the heart of the city. Helma, who was pregnant at the time, fell in love with the building, and, as luck would have it, the pair were selected out of many artists to become the new owners of this piece of local history.

Helma and Jeroen are keen upcyclers and believe that there is never a need to buy anything new, and this ethos has been the guiding principle behind all their interior style choices. We don't have a lot of money, but we do have grand taste! We always seek out affordable and practical solutions, and we love to skip-dive, which mortified our children when they were young,' says Helma, who is the founder of Sentimental Journal, an international magazine dedicated to craftsmanship and collecting.