Coming Home

Barbara de Vries

Sunday, September 18, 2022
Starting at 12 noon
Better World Cafe

322 Broad St.

Barbara de Vries and The Better World Store believe in simple, creative, and sustainable lifestyles that are sensitive to the impact and footprint we leave behind. Coming Home features the lives of 14 individuals who inspire and engage in their local communities with similar ideals.

Barbara de Vries grew up in a converted Dutch windmill–a wedding present from her father to her mother. She began her career in fashion as a model in Paris, and moved to London to study fashion design. In 1980 she launched her own collection selling to luxury retailers worldwide. In 1990 she moved to New York, became senior design director at Calvin Klein and helped create the iconic CK brand. She subsequently had her own label in the U.S. and Japan. In 2009, Barbara and her husband, author Alastair Gordon, joined forces to create illustrated books on design and lifestyle. She has had a home in Milford for the past 30 years. She made her latest book, Coming Home, Creative Living in Dutch Interiors, when her twin daughters moved to The Netherlands to study design. After spending two years photographing the houses for this book, she realized that her own farmhouse in Milford, also a mix of old and new, was a lot like the homes that were featured in her book. This inspired the name Coming Home

Barbara and The Better World Store believe in simple, creative, and sustainable lifestyles that are sensitive to the impact and footprint we leave behind. Coming Home features the lives of 14 individuals who inspire and engage in their local communities with similar ideals. A thoughtfully curated collection of spaces belonging to interior designers, product designers, architects, and artists, COMING HOME, MODERN RUSTIC: CREATIVE LIVING IN DUTCH INTERIORS showcases original and resourceful living at its best. The properties—including historic canal houses, restored farms, and eco-friendly homes—have been brought into the twenty-first century with typical Dutch style and sensibility showing a wide range of imaginative spaces filled with color and informal charm.

The homes in this book reflect the personality and spirit of the people who inhabit them—from furniture designer Valentin Loellman’s handcrafted interiors in a traditional worker’s cottage on the Maas river to fiber artist Claudy Jongstra’s farmhouse in Friesland where indigo dye plants grow in the biodynamic garden—illustrating a variety of ideas and accessible ways to incorporate Dutch-inflected style into your own surroundings. Whether it’s the traditional “lowlands” aesthetic of combining old and new, faded and inviting, into a casually chic nest, or a quirky reinvention of a space that reveals a touch of eccentricity, COMING HOME illustrates why the Netherlands is truly loved by so many and offers such a wealth of design inspiration.