“God created the earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands,” or so the old joke goes. For centuries they have been fighting against their own physical geography: holding back the North Sea and draining marshland to transform it into polders, forming an outstretched landscape of dikes and windmills.
Meander down the Amstel river from the concertina of canal houses and bicycle-crowded streets of central Amsterdam and in less than half an hour you’re in the wide pastures of the Duivendrechtse Polder. Sheep graze quietly as they have since the 17th century, swallows swoop overhead and the odd tractor sputters along the single lane that runs by the riverbank. The modern world is glimpsed only at the fringes: cars scuttle like matchbox toys around the ring road, beneath the imposing outline of the Ajax football team’s stadium.
It is a scene that is rendered in delicate Delft blue on a white-tiled wall in the farm shop of Over-Amstel Boerderij, a new farmhouse restaurant and B&B on the polder, owned by South African couple Karen Roos and Koos Bekker. Roos is a former editor of Elle Decoration South Africa, Bekker the billionaire chair of technology group Naspers, whose offshoot Prosus is floated on the Amsterdam stock exchange.
They opened their first hotel, Babylonstoren, in South Africa in 2010, an immaculately revived Cape Dutch farm in the Franschhoek wine valley. In 2019, it was followed by the Newt, a fantastical working estate in the Somerset countryside. Six years on from opening, The Newt isn’t so much a hotel as a phenomenon: some 250,000 visitors passed through its gardens last year, it has been garlanded with awards and is frequently fully booked (despite nightly rates that start at around £800). Compared with such starry siblings, little Over-Amstel has, so far, kept a much lower profile.
I arrive in late March, not from Amsterdam but from the pretty village of Ouderkerk aan de Amstel to the south, where guests are collected in a low blue boat, winding along the water between reed-lined riverbanks. One of the houses we pass belongs to Roos and Bekker. It was here they came some 40 years ago to raise their family for a while; Roos attended art school, while Bekker grew Nasper’s international operations, which today include a lucrative stake in Chinese tech giant Tencent and food delivery company Just Eat, which Prosus acquired earlier this year.
Over-Amstel’s chief executive Klaas Pieter also grew up nearby and had a Saturday job gardening for Bekker. “Back then there were about double the farmers there are now,” he explains. “So when I’m talking about the future I’m really focusing on preserving the area, finding ways to co-operate with our neighbouring farmers so they remain farmers, and the polder remains the polder.”
Compared with the Newt, Over-Amstel is the baby sister — a pocket of 60 acres to the Somerset estate’s 2,000. Walking in the neatly edged kitchen garden, Pieter talks animatedly about his plans for beds filled with herbs, vegetables and edible flowers, all wrapped around the central maze of espalier pear trees: buttery Louise Bonne, juicy Clapp’s, smooth Comice.
“People might call it a time capsule,” he says as we walk over wooden bridges across the drainage channels. “But it’s actually the link between the new world and the old world — unpicking the middle period when farming got really industrial. We can be a platform where people start to understand where their food comes from.”
Standing handsomely on the Amstel, the 1894-built longhouse has been meticulously restored. The “front house”, its neat brickwork topped with a traditional double-pitched gambrel roof, is now home to a handful of B&B bedrooms (the first two opened in September, three more will soon follow). The attached thatched barn has been reimagined as a farm-to-fork restaurant. Behind, five new barns have been built around the yard, though with their perfectly weathered bricks or aged timber, they are almost indistinguishable from the originals.
In one, a French baker prepares croissants and sourdough for breakfast, while in the creamery, huge whirling vats are filled with milk from the neighbouring farmer. Another houses the farm shop, which opened in February and is laden with homemade jams, sauerkraut and fruit syrups. Next door, hens peck around their beautiful new home; across the yard, I collect an electric bike for a whizz along the riverside. Soon pigs will arrive and the planting will be finished. There’s talk of a second boat and a terrace for the summer. Like the start of spring, the place is alive with promise.
Not that anyone seems to believe that will be the full extent of the project. With Roos and Bekker around, things have a habit of joining the fold: the Newt has expanded from Hadspen House, the original manor, to include the conversion of a nearby farmhouse, the opening of a restaurant on the platform of the nearest railway station, and the acquisition of a herd of buffalo, among numerous other initiatives. In December, a family trust linked to Bekker sold €156mn of Prosus shares to fund building operations across their hotels. That would buy a few buffalo.
Along with this Dutch outpost, the couple have been busy elsewhere. On the wide sands of Keurboomstrand on South Africa’s Western Cape — a place where Bekker’s family have been holidaying for decades — they recently opened Blou in Keurbooms, a cluster of beachside cottages bookable only by previous guests of The Newt and Babylonstoren. At Babylonstoren they unveiled Soetmelksvlei, a former farmstead that is now a productive hub of rural craft workshops. In the Cornish village of St Ive, they created the immersive Story of Emily museum, tracing the life of humanitarian Emily Hobhouse — Hadspen House was the seat of the Hobhouse family; this is Emily’s childhood home. And next spring they’ll add eight-bedroom country house Yarlington Lodge in Somerset.
For all the activity, however, Roos and Bekker manage to make everything feel somehow organic. Passion projects writ large — and with blank cheques — rather than rampant expansion. Hadspen House was originally slated to be the family’s British home before it grew wildly in scope and ambition; Over-Amstel was bought to save it from developers who planned to build four modern villas in its place.
In the restaurant, the unfussy menu is already filled with produce from the farm and the surrounding area: whipped ricotta from the creamery, slathered on toast and topped with vivid pink rounds of radish (€13.50); thick wild game merguez sausages from Amsterdam-based Wild van Wild on freshly baked brioche buns (€14.50). “I try to source everything from within the Netherlands,” explains chef Herb van Drongelen after the busy lunch service. “Perhaps, the best example is that we don’t have orange juice at breakfast. In Holland we have beautiful juices — apple, pear, plum — so why would we get loads of oranges from Valencia?”
Upstairs, the first couple of bedrooms range through the eaves, each decorated with Roos’s deft hand, mixing sleek modern armchairs with antique light fixtures and playfully painted-over Dutch Master-style portraits by Anglo-Italian duo Young & Battaglia. The next three rooms are beneath, including two with painted ceilings and four-poster beds, as well as Room Kelder (the cream cellar), a converted former cheese store where the original tiled counter has been refashioned into a bathroom sink.
The small scale lends an intimacy and informality. By early evening on the last day visitors have drifted away, and I’m the only overnight guest. I steal back downstairs for a glass of wine while chef Herb and his team chat and joke, sharing stories with me about the rare winters where the Amstel outside freezes and it’s possible to ice skate all the way into the city. In summer, you can dive off the little wooden jetties into the river and swim.
At the moment, the restaurant only serves dinner on weekly “themed” nights — evenings dedicated to the asparagus season, say, or the garden’s first harvest. Although the plan is to increase the frequency as word grows, for now there’s a handful of smart restaurants down in Ouderkerk, or all of Amsterdam, for other dinner plans. Later, in my room, with the windows open to the river, the gentle hum of passing cyclists stills for the day and rowers skim along the surface like water boatmen as the low sun casts the Amstel in a reflective silver glow.
The next morning, at a public workshop in the gleaming creamery, time slows again as I swirl and separate the curds and whey, patience rewarded with praise from cheesemaker Dewi van Lieshout, who talks us through the secrets of her craft (carefully cutting, draining, taking temperatures). The class is one of a handful that Over-Amstel offers, along with quiche making, fermenting, pickling and more, each offering a gentle get-your-hands-dirty immersion.
After a few weeks ageing on the wooden shelves in Dewi’s cave, my cheese will be packed up and posted to me. Another beautifully preserved slice of polder life.
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