Postcards from Scheveningen – A Plea to revive the Scheveningen High Back Beach Chair (Dutch Design 47)

Postcard of Scheveningen Beach dating before 1900
Postcard of Scheveningen Beach dating before 1900

Scheveningen is a suburb of The Hague and the main beach resort of The Netherlands.

1906 Postcard - Scheveningen beach with the Kurhaus
1906 Postcard - Scheveningen beach with the Kurhaus

Since we enjoy a wonderful summer here in the Hague, I’m remembering the typical good old cane High Back Scheveningen Beach Chair that used to be all over the Scheveningen beaches. These chairs disappeared completely from the Scheveningen Beach scene in the 70ies.

One problem was that they are very heavy. You need two persons to move them. The second problem is they were a bit unstable. With a bit of wind, they are easily blown over.

However, they had two huge advantages:

  1. Wind protection.
    By their design they already offered a nice protection against the wind. If you added a towel inside in the back the protection was complete.
  2. They offered you a nice feel of privacy: No strangers’ eyes burning in your back.

Dreamy Scheveningen Beach Postcard - Undated
Dreamy Scheveningen Beach Postcard - Undated

I’ve grabbed some historic postcard pictures from the internet to make my point while I was in search of modern equivalents for this wonderful beach chair, but couldn’t find a decent one. That is strange as the modern materials for outdoor chairs are so flexible. High Back beach chairs still do have a function as the following postcard fro a German Beach proves:
Postcard from a recent G8 Top
Postcard from a recent G8 Top

A recent G 8 top postcard with several World Leaders on a Northern German beach in its own model of a high back beach chair. It is much heavier, hence it is not feasible for Scheveningen where you have to adapt to the wind direction frequently, but a swiveling high back maybe?

So Chair designers out there: If the Germans can do this, why can’t the Dutch do this?

Mashing up Kudos from Uptake with ClusterUrl and Amplify – Now I’m a Clogger

Uptake-Travel-Industry-Blog

The good people, more precisely P.Ling, at Uptake’s Travel Industry Blog ranked me among their top 15 Hotel Blogs. Thank you P. Ling at Uptake! Alas Uptake has discontinued since.

For me a reason to look again at one of my favorite posts: Blogging Hotel Insiders. I had 40 Blogging hotel insiders. My choice was a bit wider on the one hand and a bit narrower on the other hand: I did not include some Travel Industry Blogs. In addition there are still a some to be added. So I updated my post and put it in the sidebar as one of my favorite posts.

Another Blogger used the Uptake Blog for the following snipped which I was able to retrieve via a Google link by the comment of Elliott NG:

Hotel Blogging: 15 Blogs that Attract Interest

Like every other sector, the hotel industry too has it’s own set of A-list bloggers who lead the conversation. These 15 hotel blogs and their bloggers listed here offer their readers the best hospitality experience, so to speak.

  1. Hotelchatter – Hotelchatter, along with sister publication Jaunted, is published by SFO Media, which is now owned by Conde Nast.
    Offers breaking news and genuine hotel reviews with on-location, view and anti-view posts. Hotelchatter does an excellent job of hammering new hotel openings with posts and follow-ups well before the hotel is anywhere near opening it’s doors.
  2. Hotel Check-in – USA Today blog run by Barbara De Lollis, focusing mainly on business travel and new developments in the hotel industry. Also shares plenty of hotel deals and entertaining news stories related to hotels. Hotel Check-in leverages it’s brand quite often to attract guest posts by CEO’s and senior executives from the hotel industry.
  3. Uptake Hotels blog – Very dedicated group of hotel bloggers, with plenty of reviews and tips for finding the right hotels. Color me biased, but Uptake’s Hotels blog would merit a mention on this list even if it was being compiled elsewhere.
  4. Hotel News Now – HNN is a division of Smith Travel Research, which gives this blog exclusive access to all kinds of data and insight into the latest trends and reports for the global hotel industry. It also helps to have the Managing Director, President and CEO of STR blogging for you. Very useful blog if you need the latest facts and figures for presentations or articles.
  5. Hotels Magazine – Not just a blog, but blogs – 10 of them. Each blog authored by industry experts with decades of relevant industry experience. For example, Lyndall De Marco, co-author of the Eco-Speak blog, was executive director of the International Tourism Partnership and runs a consultancy which helps clients merge profitability with sustainability. The other co-author, Ray Burger, is president and founder of Pineapple Hospitality Inc., with over 30 years of experience in the lodging industry.
  6. Hotel Law Blog – This blog is a part of the Global Hospitality Group, and again, authored by a terrific group of heavily experienced hotel lawyers led by Jim Butler and senior hospitality industry executives. If it has anything to do with hotel financing or legal issues affecting the hospitality industry, then you’ll find it here.
  7. And here we come:

  8. Three hotel bloggers who seem to have all their ducks lined up properly include Josiah Mackenzie of HotelMarketingStrategies.com, the Happy Hotelier, and Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel-Blogs.com.
  9. Mention also needs to be made of two blogs – Gadling and LA Times’ Daily Deal blog – which aren’t exactly limited to hotels. It’s a compliment to these blogs and their writers that the range, quality and quantity of their hotel related content beats the offerings of many blogs which are solely devoted to hotels.
  10. You might also enjoy checking out these three ’company’ blogs – Bill Marriott’s Blog (Marriott on the Move), the Dealbase blog, and Oyster Hotel Reviews blog.
  11. And lastly, did you know about the TA hotel reviews which don’t get published? You can find them on the We Are Not Making This Up blog
  12. .

    Source: P.Ling http://travel-industry.uptake.com
    Posted 3rd August 2009 by Alexandros Paraskevas

clusters

Then, thanks to @CleverClogs of Clever Clogs – what’s in a name, see below:-) – I found ClusterUrl [Update: Disconinued Since] and as a test put the 15 mentioned by Uptake in a Cluster: Top 15 Hotel Blogs and Bloggers according to Uptake.

About ClusterUrl
ClusterUrl is a simple mash up to avoid having your browser open with umpteen screens. Instead you can put them in a Cluster and refer back to the cluster and share various links with your friends or readers. For the time being I have this one published at the bottom of my sidebar.

login-amplify

Then Amplify [Also discuntinued in March 2012] found me and had me fiddling around with it. Now what is Amplify? It is a Multi User WordPress blog where you can dump clippings of sites you are browsing for later reading or for sharing via Twitter. It has some nifty features and it is free. So it is a ClipLog or abbreviated a Clog. As a Dutchman, or inhabitant of Cloggieland as my foreign friends tend to tease me, this new term appeals to me. From now on I’m a Clogger. Look it up! Here is my little Amplify stream.

About Amplify

Amplify was developed by the same company that created Clipmarks.com. Clipmarks, based in New York City, is majority-owned and operated by its employees. Forbes Media holds a minority interest in the company. The Company’s philosophy on information sharing is comprised of three main principles: (i) people can do a better job than algorithms of filtering the massive amount of information that’s available on the web; (ii) serendipitous discovery is often more compelling than information organized by topic; and (iii) limiting the length of shared content allows people to learn about more topics than they would otherwise have time or patience for.
Amplify was created to serve the needs of two audiences that are not the focus of Clipmarks.com: (i) Twitter users; and (ii) Groups.

Post Alia
Both have in common that they draw traffic away from your blog on the one hand. On the other hand it can draw traffic to your blog from the specific community….

The same problem you have with syndicating your content.

A pregnant example of problems with syndication is Uptake’s post. If I look at Technorati, it is not Uptake who links to me, but PhocusWright where they syndicated this post…although technorati is fast sliding in oblivion when it continues to behave so wobbly as it does now already for months..Apparently PhocusWright has a higher Technorati ranking than Uptake today… Nowadays WordPress uses Google for it’s track backs. So in my WP Dashboard Google gives the original track back. You see? I’ll never understand SEO….

Last edited by GJE on March 13, 2012 at 4:11 pm and added to my Internet Graveyard category

Russian Lace for a new Amsterdam Hotel Design Concept

Lace-Hotel-Amsterdam-by-Dima-Loginoff-01

I was just talking about the Dutch influencing the UK and the US in the 17nd century. But we also influenced the Russian Czar Peter the great who lived a couple of years in The Netherlands to learn the craft of ship building. The wooden Czar Peter house in Zaandam, north of Amsterdam where he lived is still a tourist attraction today.
This cultural bond with Russia has recently culminated in Russian president Medvedev opening the Amsterdam branch of the Russian St Petersburg Hermitage museum, the Hermitage Amsterdam together with our Queen Beatrix. In its first month it drew over 100,000 visitors, which is not bad for a medium sized museum.

Lace-Hotel-Amsterdam-by-Dim

Now I would like to introduce you to a young Russian Designer Dima Loginoff. He wants to bring Russian lace back to Amsterdam in the form of a concept of the Lace Hotel. I take it he has looked a bit to Dutch designer Marcel Wanders who also thinks lace. As I quoted in a prior “The future is back to knitting” and lace is the result of a sort of knitting isn’t it?

Lace-Hotel-Amsterdam-by-Dima Loginoff- Interior
Lace-Hotel-Amsterdam-by-Dima Loginoff- Interior

Dima’s concept won the prize “design without limits” at the Design Debut Contest 2008 in St. Petersburg, While Russian lace should cover the facade of a traditional Amsterdam canal house a textile ceiling is provided for in the lobby and restaurant, huge historical redesigned prints of Diane de Poitiers and Gabrielle d’Estrées. So the circle is full:-)

Confessions of a Hotelier: Two Brides – One (G)room…almost

2-brides-one-g-room

Our small luxurious 3 suites hotel is the Siamese twin of our own terraced townhouse. It’s front door is always closed and I always receive our guests personally. Sometimes I receive several just married couples after their wedding party in the middle of the night (early in the morning). Also this time…

Couple 1 had the key already, because they had stayed the night before their wedding.
Couple 2 had not arrived yet.
It was approx 02.15 AM
I had fallen asleep in my chair…watching some night movie.

My wife was in bed already and woke me up: “Darling, I believe they’ve arrived. I believe I hear something next door”
I listened and said “No, I don’t hear anything… not possible…they didn’t ring the doorbell…I would have known”

A few moments later:
“Ring Ring” the telephone. “Yes we are Couple 2 and, err, I’m now taking a bath, but we thought this is kind of strange, because we believed we would be welcomed personally and we didn’t see anybody”
Me: “I’m glad you called! Yes you are right it is our intention to always welcome everybody personally!..I have several things here ready for you” (champagne and sandwiches that I subsequently served to the room)…

Turned out Couple 1 had checked themselves in and left the front door ajar without them or me noticing and Couple 2 had thought there was an electric door opener. Luckily they had taken the correct suite ….

Books about the common roots of UK, US and Dutch societies

the_island_at_the_center_of_the_world_the_epic_story_of_dutch_manhattan_and_the_forgotten_colony
In my previous post I promised to share two books I’m currently reading.

Recently, on occasion of their return to Texas, we offered a farewell dinner to an expat couple that had resided with us as long stay guests. They concluded their stay in The Netherlands of over three years with the observation that there are more similarities in character between Americans and Dutch that they would have believed. They also pointed me to a recent book of Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World, that gives some background explanation.

It is an epic story about the discovery of New Amsterdam and it’s early years as a settlement of the Dutch West Indies Company (in Dutch Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie). The book is based on historic material kept under dust for ages, but popped up in Albany, New York, of all places. For over 25 years there sits a historian who is in the process of translating over 12,000 Dutch language documents dating back to the first half of the 17nd century. The Dutch were too tidy and destroyed most of their West India Company’s archives so it is a sort of wonder this new material popped up. It is known as The New Netherland Project or NNP. Do visit their site as they have a wealth of material!

I learned Englishman Henry Hudson discovered New Amsterdam on commission of the Dutch East India Company (VOC or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie). On a former trip he had discovered Newfoundland on commission of the British Muscovy Company, in search of a northern passage to the India. He had hoped that via the rivers Hudson or Connecticut he could reach the great lakes and from there there was a passage to India.

Going Dutch by Lisa Jardine

When buying The Island at the Center of the World I stumbled on the book Going Dutch, How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, by English writer Lisa Jardine.

Coincidentally Robbert Russo penned an insightful column for the New York Times Going Dutch about how an American looks at Dutch society.

Lisa uses the subtitle more as a eye catcher than as a flag covering her cargo: She describes the early 17nd century more from a view of an art historian. How thinkers, architects, landscape architects, sculptors and painters from the low countries influenced the English courts. How members of the Royalists party got refuge in The Hague during Cromwell’s reign and how the various European courts especially those who were not in the Roman Catholic league like the Spanish were related, intermingled and intermarried and tried to cooperate in their struggle against the Spanish. All up to the year 1688 when William and Mary took over the English throne.

It is really fun to read the two books together. If you’re interested in Dutch, US and/or UK history both books are a must read!