Van Oldenbarneveltstraat: shopping Rotterdam's design street
Rotterdam is the wrong city for people who want things finished. Almost nothing here is old, because almost nothing here survived, and what replaced it was built by people who decided that rebuilding was a chance rather than a chore.
That attitude has a street, and we are on it.
Van Oldenbarneveltstraat
Van Oldenbarneveltstraat is Rotterdam's design street. Architecture studios, galleries and independent retail, all within a few minutes' walk of the Witte de Withkwartier. It is not a luxury strip and it does not want to be one. There is no row of flagship stores here selling the same twelve brands you can buy in any European capital.
What there is instead: a concentration of people who make things, and a street where a shop behaving like an exhibition space does not look out of place. We have been at number 99 since 2009.
A day around us
If you are coming from outside the city, the walk is short and worth doing properly.
The Witte de Withstraat is two minutes away and holds most of the city's contemporary galleries and a dense run of bars and restaurants. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Depot — the mirrored bowl you have seen photographs of, where the collection is stored in public — are a ten-minute walk south. The Markthal and the cube houses are further east, and are the two things every visitor photographs.
Most of it fits in an afternoon. Rotterdam is compact in a way Amsterdam is not.
Where our customers come from
Our audience is local and loyal first. Beyond that, the store draws steadily from Antwerp, Amsterdam and the Ruhr — a two-hour radius that covers three countries and a lot of people who would rather drive to a store that carries something specific than walk to one that carries everything.
That geography shapes what we buy. A customer coming from Düsseldorf for the afternoon is not looking for what is already in Düsseldorf.
What you will actually find
The rail mixes registers deliberately. Younger designers with a story, cultural labels and established maisons hang together, because our customers move between them and see no reason why the store should not.
The room gets rebuilt per brand and per drop — vitrines, plinths, a blue floor plane. If you visit twice in a season it will not look the same twice.
And the staff will explain things if you want them explained. That is the actual service: narrative, silhouette, material. A customer who understands what they are looking at buys with conviction, and comes back.
Visiting
ANSH46, Van Oldenbarneveltstraat 99, 3012 GS Rotterdam. Fifteen minutes on foot from Rotterdam Centraal, or a short ride on the metro to Eendrachtsplein.
If you cannot make it, we ship across Europe — menswear, womenswear, footwear and bags are all online.