march-2012

PHOTOS © KIM ZWARTS, HOLLANDSE HOOGTE/JURDEN DRENTH, LUC HARINGS
PROPERTY | AMSTERDAM
Northern
exp sure
AMSTERDAM’S NOORD BOROUGH
HAS GONE FROM THE CITY’S LEAST
DESIRABLE DISTRICT TO ITS
HOTTEST SPOT TO LIVE, BUT IS IT
TOO LATE TO BUY THERE?
MARK SMITH
WITH ITS DELUXE waterside penthouses, hip art
galleries and creative industries, Amsterdam’s Noord
borough is a hip, urban neighbourhood, the sort that
can be found in capital cities across Europe.
Like Paris’s Pigalle or Shoreditch in London,
Vienna’s Karmeliterviertel district and Kreuzberg in
Berlin, it’s the kind of place that attracts the coolest
kids and where young professionals fl ock to live, eat
and socialise, in the hope that the cultural buzz will
rub off on them.
Noord shares another thing in common with its
European brethren: until recently, no one wanted
to live there. When Luc Harings moved in 11 years
ago, it was his last resort. “I’d graduated from the
Rijksakademie, I was a starving artist and couldn’t
afford to live anywhere else in Amsterdam,” he recalls.
“After days of fruitless house hunting elsewhere, my
girlfriend said, ‘Let’s face it. We’re going to have to
choose between homelessness and Noord.’”
Run down, impoverished and overlooked – a world
away from the Golden Age grandeur of Amsterdam’s
central canal belt – Noord’s reputation was so bad then
that it was frequently likened to a penal colony by the
well-heeled residents on the “right” side of the water.
“A lot of people in social housing had been moved by
the city council to fl ats in the dirt-cheap Noord, in
order to allow the gentrifi cation of more central areas,
like the picturesque Jordaan,” says Harings. “There
were rumours of ghettos, gangs and social unrest.”
Indeed, with its blustery harbour-side expanses,
austere tower blocks and rusty warehouses – relics of
the heavy industries that once fl ourished here – Noord
may not be the stately idyll that Amsterdam postcards
94 | TRAVELLER
are made of, but that’s precisely its appeal for the new
generation of creatives who’ve made the borough hot
property. “I loved it immediately,” says Harings, who
went on to establish a successful graphic-design studio
in the area. “It turned out to be very different from the
grim stereotype. It’s really quite safe and community
minded, and there’s so much space! When you get on
that ferry from Amsterdam city centre – one of the
most densely populated places in the world – it’s like
you’re leaving your cares behind.”
Consequently, when Harings had the option of
buying his rental house near the Wilhelmina-Dok
six years ago, he jumped at the opportunity to make
Noord his permanent home. “It’s been the perfect
place to bring up my children,” he says of his