Why this man traded Porsches for an 1895 houseboat

Vintage’s daughters, Elle (left) and Lux, at the tiny home inhabited by Lux that sits in the houseboat’s garden in Amsterdam. Photos: Kasia Gatkowska/@2024 The New York Times Company

These days, Dutch entrepreneur Rick Vintage lives alone on an old boat, a 75ft-long (23m) vessel from 1895 called Vrouwe Jacoba (Mrs Jacoba, in Dutch) on a canal in a quiet corner of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

It is moored in front of a 4,800sq ft (446sq m) garden that contains a tiny house, now inhabited by his daughter Lux, 18, who comes on board mornings for coffee before dashing off to school. He lives with his dog, Moos. There are no passersby, and he often dines alone on the deck.

“I’ve always been a bit of a hermit,” he said in a video call from the Netherlands.

But it was not always so for Vintage, whose life was strikingly different only a few years ago. He founded a wallpaper business, NLXL, in 2010 with his wife, Esther Vintage, starting with images of wood planks for their beach house.

“I put planks on the scanner, made prints and installed it in our living room,” he said. “I could smell it: This was going to be a worldwide success.”

But he worried that the design was too similar to work by Piet Hein Eek, whom he described as a design hero.The houseboat is moored in front of a garden that contains a tiny house inhabited by Vintage’s daughter Lux.

“So I decided to send him a message to ask if he’d be interested in working with us.”

They became partners on the design, called Piet Hein Eek Scrapwood Wallpaper. Eek said, in an email, “I always make sure, in advance, that with whom I work it’s fun to work with and might be a friend. It turned out to be one of the most joyful collaborations till now, and we’re friends now.”

The Vintages expanded their offerings, adding digitally printed trompe l’oeil patterns, including embossed tin and weathered concrete, and the company became an overnight success.

“We acquired 3,000 resellers in 70 countries in a year and a half. And I became rich,” Vintage said.The floor of the living room is covered with vintage rugs to keep it warm in the winter.

He got to meet many designers he admired, including English fashion luminary Paul Smith, who said upon being introduced, “I know who you are. You’re the wallpaper guy.” (Smith would later put NLXL wallpaper in the windows of his New York store, as would Saks Fifth Avenue.)

At the time, Vintage lived with his wife and two daughters in an 18th-century farmhouse in Voorburg, outside of The Hague. But the money and the fame turned him into, in his own words, “a bit of a prick”. The orders – and the cash – kept pouring in, and the company won numerous awards.

In those days, many people told Vintage he was special.

“And I guess I started to believe that I was,” he said.

He bought expensive cars – three Porsches in one year – and was flying around the world. It was time for a change, but not necessarily the one he had intended.

In 2016, he and Esther divorced, and Vintage moved into an apartment in an ornate 1830 building in The Hague. It was boldly decorated with miles of designer wallpaper and clusters of trendy furniture, including a sleek Koen sofa by Piet Boon and Tree Trunk chairs by Eek. (Both Piets are Dutch designers and NLXL contributors.) There was also the ultimate display of bachelordom: fake plants, dominated by a surrealist Gufram cactus. The eye-catching space was written about extensively.The well-equipped kitchen in the houseboat.

“Two years later I drove to a party in Rotterdam in my brand-new Porsche 911 GTS with my 20-years-younger girlfriend next to me,” he recounted.

He was scared of the person he had become, he said, a man who didn’t know where his own daughters were.

“This is when I really pulled the plug on all the travelling and all the glamour. And I started to live a different life. That’s how it all began.”

He split up with the girlfriend and spent the rest of the year on his Koen sofa, alone, with occasional depression and anxiety attacks. He wondered who he was without all the applause.

“Somewhere, in the back of my head, I knew that I had always been very good at being alone, but I just didn’t remember how.”The outdoor deck overlooks the garden on shore, and is where Vintage hosts friends in the summer.

Meanwhile, NLXL was losing a lot of money. Not only had Vintage taken a long hiatus from work after the divorce, but big and small companies had begun copying the collections. He sold his assets – including cars – to pay the bills and pared down the staff to just two people: he and his ex-wife.

Then came the pandemic; he contracted Covid-19. But somehow the enforced isolation become a comfort.

“There I was – alone, broke, with Covid, no applause – and feeling better than ever,” he recalled.

He began to reconnect with his daughters. In 2020, Lux had just started studying music in college in Amsterdam, and he looked for a place in that city but found everything in the central area “crazy expensive”.

He spotted an ad for a houseboat with a garden on the edge of town. With Lux and his other daughter, Ella, now 21, who lives with her mother in Voorburg and studies nutrition, he went to have a look. Twenty-four hours later, he owned it.

Life on the Vrouwe Jacoba wasn’t always accommodating, Vintage said.

“The toilet didn’t flush, the heating didn’t work and there was leakage everywhere. The interior – which I had decided not to change – was mainly yellowish ’70s wood strips, and the kitchen didn’t even have a stove.”

So gradually he made adjustments. Though he aspired to live without luxury, he still wanted a hot shower. He had the plumbing fixed and installed a wood-burning stove himself.The dining corner where a Piet Hein Eek lamp hangs above the table.

“I invested in some good tools and started working,” he said.

He eventually got proficient enough at DIY to build a comfortable kitchen. Because the boat is made of steel and lacked insulation, it was cold in winter. To combat this, he covered the floors with vintage rugs. There is, he said, “really an incredible difference between not having this on the floor and having these rugs on the floor”.

Much of the designer furniture, including the Gufram cactus, was too big for the boat, so he put it in storage and moved the Tree Trunk chairs out to the garden. He saw no reason to part with the Koen sofa on which he had spent so many hours; he simply cut off the side and back frame to make it fit.

“I took a photo and sent it to Piet Boon to congratulate him on his newest sofa design,” he said.

Far from offended, Boon described Vintage in an email as “an entrepreneur who enjoys life to the fullest and has a knack for seizing opportunities. His trendsetting sensibilities mean he consistently brings fresh ideas to the table”.

Vintage said he misses having a girlfriend but conceded that it can be difficult to find someone he can be alone with.

“I am grateful for the past relationship and current friendship I have with my ex-wife, Esther,” he said, “since she is the only one I can still be alone with.” Because he finds working alone much more challenging than living by himself, he and Esther meet to work together two mornings a week.The bedroom on board the houseboat. Behind the bed is wallpaper with a wood print by NLXL.

Still, he is hardly antisocial.

“In summer, I cook outside on the deck,” he said. “Sometimes friends come over, since my ship is the best place to have dinner when it’s warm. If it’s really hot, we jump in the water.”

Lux finds her living arrangement ideal.

“I make music and write my songs here,” she wrote in an email about her 260sq ft (24sq m) house on the shore.

“I can sing as loud as I want. Living in a dorm, I wouldn’t be able to sing or play guitar.”

In her father’s apartment in The Hague, there was always a lot of city noise, she recalled.

“Here, I wake up to the sounds of birds – and I love it.”

In 2022, Vintage started a new company, Dorbll, an app-driven video doorbell. In the past, he was a workaholic, going to bed at 1am and getting up at various times to answer emails from different world markets. Now he works more reasonable hours.

“I need time for me, my daughters, my friends, my dog,” he said. “I’m now 57, I make 10% of what I made before, I lead a comfortable, stressless life, and I am very happy being by myself.” – @2024 The New York Times Company