You know me: fond of traveling, nuts about my brothers and a real party girl. All three came together this summer. Harm, my oldest brother, got married to the love of his life, Beñat. The wedding didn’t take place in the Netherlands, but in the flowery village where Beñat comes from in the Basque Country.
Harm had asked his girlfriends and me to help him with the decorations for the wedding reception. So, I packed everything from streamers to beautiful bowls, vases, striped napkins and a nightgown for Harm’s brand-new sister-in-law – and left for Northern Spain with way too many bags and suitcases.
On the day before the party, we set the long tables with sleek, white linen. We placed flowers on them in long straight lines and my new lilac porcelain.
As they say, happiness is even better when shared. And Harm and Beñat showed how true this is.
A few days after the wedding, I travelled on to southern Spain, to Seville. I stayed with my dear friend Kaja at her home with walls made of loam and old wooden shutters. When you step inside, the sunlight shines through those shutters in a striped pattern.
Kaja’s favourite colour is yellow. You’ll find it all around her home.
Every morning, I started my day with yoga exercises among the pinkish-red flowering bougainvillea, palm-like plants and twittering birds of the inner garden. And in the afternoon, I enjoyed a siesta in my kimono. While relaxing on the daybed, I gazed at the antique palace door that Kaya had placed against a wall, and imagined that I could enter a palace through that door. I walked over the Spanish tiles along mosaic-adorned walls, picked up a grape from the table and pictured a flamenco dancer at the end of the hallway. She gave me her colourful fan. ‘Viva la vida’ was written on it. At that moment, I had daydreamed my way to my complete new collection.
