When the founders and creative directors of Amsterdam-based interior design studio Nicemakers are off duty, you can find them in a residence so remote that locating it feels like a treasure hunt. “Google Maps tends to send you the wrong way,” Dax Roll warns Monocle before we arrive at his sprawling rural retreat in Veluwe, a lush nature reserve in the northeastern tip of the Gelderland province, an hour outside the Dutch capital. But our efforts are richly rewarded: the mid-century bungalow, set among fir trees and fields of heather, is an incentive to put down your phone and let nature guide the way.

“Since we completed The Hoxton in 2014 the phone has been ringing off the hook,” says Roll, while unpacking organic vegetables, fresh loaves and fragrant coriander picked up at a food market in nearby Zwolle. Following the unanticipated success of the studio they founded in 2011, Roll and Joyce Urbanus, his partner, created a house in which they could unwind, called the Forest Home. After they discovered the run-down property, they tapped their interior design and architect friends, and within six months the house had been opened up so that its surroundings were visible from all angles.

The pair has designed a slew of smart hospitality spaces: Amsterdam’s renovated De L’Europe hotel in 2021; a country house in Ardennes in 2022; The Brecon, a revamped ski chalet in the Swiss Alps, completed last year; and De Plesman, a hotel in The Hague in the former KLM headquarters, which opened in March. The pair are now working on their Mediterranean residence in Menorca, a restaurant on a regenerative farm in Tuscany and a project in Abu Dhabi, their first foray into Emirati hospitality.

Designing for hospitality came particularly easy to Roll, who grew up working in restaurants and bars before going into fashion marketing. “I didn’t have experience in interior design like Joyce but I understood the practical requirements of designing a hospitality venue,” he says. “Warm lighting is imperative: designers tend to consider illumination as the last stage of the project but we begin with it and work backwards.” Urbanus agrees: “We want our interiors to feel unforced,” she says. “The best compliment we’ve received is that our designs feel timeless, like they’ve been like that forever.”

Indeed, the Nicemakers duo create each of their spaces with longevity in mind. “A client recently invited us back to the penthouse we designed for them a few years ago and the place looked the same,” says Urbanus. It’s their barometer of success: “If something is well-designed, there should be no need to change it.”