Trading Porsches for a Houseboat and a Gentler Way of Life

This article is part of our Design special section about creating space with the look and feel for one person.

These days, the Dutch entrepreneur Rick Vintage lives alone on an old boat, a 75-foot-long vessel from 1895 called “Vrouwe Jacoba” (Mrs. Jacoba, in Dutch) on a canal in a quiet corner of Amsterdam. It is moored in front of a 4,800-square-foot 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 passers-by, 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 Mr. Vintage, whose life was strikingly different only a few years ago. He founded his 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. “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. “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,” said Mr. Eek in an email.

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

At the time, he 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.

The Belgian designer Job Smeets recalled the time, in 2014, his company, Studio Job, and Mr. Vintage shared an Elle Deco International Design Award for their collaboration on a hallucinatory wallpaper, called Industry, patterned with skulls, machine cogs and missiles. The awards ceremony was in a luxury hotel in Milan, and the audience was filled with design legends like Alessandro Mendini and Gaetano Pesce.

“Rick took the mic,” Mr. Smeets recounted, “and instead of giving a speech, he spontaneously started to sing, in a really beautiful baritone kind of voice, a phonetic Italian song that sounded totally Italian, but all the words were made up. And the whole crowd went crazy, everybody standing ovation, and it was like the best thing ever.”

In those days, many people told Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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.

“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 traveling 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.”

Meanwhile, NLXL was losing a lot of money. Not only had Mr. 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. 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, Mr. 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. “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, Mr. Boon described Mr. 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.”

Mr. 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.

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 260-square-foot 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, Mr. Vintage started a new company, Dorbll, an app-driven video doorbell. In the past, he was a workaholic, going to bed at 1 a.m., 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 percent of what I made before, I lead a comfortable, stress-less life, and I am very happy being by myself.”