Kruisherenhotel Maastricht

To put it a bit broadly, the Dutch are no strangers to recycling spaces and putting them to inventive use — close to half the country is reclaimed land, for a start. And here you’ll find cutting-edge design in some of the unlikeliest of places, like the fifteenth-century monastery that’s now home to the Kruisherenhotel.

A thorough renovation at the hands of the interior designer Henk Vos has transformed the character of the place; the original monks’ cloisters have been converted into handsome modern hotel rooms that are anything but ascetic, and even the relatively undisturbed spaces, like the monumental interiors of the monastery’s Gothic church, are deeply altered by the introduction of sleek modern furnishings by a number of Dutch designers, lighting installations by the German artist Ingo Maurer, and bits and bobs by the likes of Le Corbusier, Philippe Starck and Marc Newson.

Rooms are minimalist in style, heavy on white space, frosted glass and hardwoods, simple and luxurious at once. Public areas include a stunning mezzanine breakfast room, a wine bar and a coffee bar, as well as extensive meeting facilities and the decidedly low-tech old monastery gardens, a touch of pastoral calm in the old city center. It’s a godsend for anyone in Maastricht on other business, and for Dutch design fanatics, it’s worthy of a pilgrimage in itself.