On the Golden Bend of the Herengracht, the grandest stretch of the most prestigious canal in the Netherlands, sits Huis de Vicq, a double-width mansion built in 1670 for a physician and councillor of Amsterdam. One room on the piano nobile boasts ceiling frescoes by the master painter Jacob de Wit depicting allegorical figures dissolving into clouds. In the baroque garden at the back, a relief of Mercury, god of trade, adorns the pavilion.
Mercury appears to have looked kindly on the latest tenants. Today, Huis de Vicq is alive with the business of clothes: a consignment of bespoke Italian fabrics is making its way up the grand Louis XIV staircase beneath a domed cupola; a pattern-cutter works from a raspberry-pink room overlooking the canal. The garden house is now a fabric archive.
This is the HQ of Róhe (pronounced “ROH-uh”), a womenswear label that has established itself as a quietly compelling voice in European fashion. Founded in 2021 by designer Marieke Meulendijks and her husband Maickel Weyers, it is a contemporary luxury brand – Italian mills, exclusive fabric development – with a minimalist aesthetic: leather blouson jackets (from about £850) and sculptural midi dresses (from about £680); tailored trousers in interesting cuts and plenty of cashmere knitwear to pile on top. Jennifer Lawrence and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley have worn it; stockists include Liberty London, Net-a-Porter and Velour in Amsterdam.
Meulendijks says they prioritise “what a cloth can do”. Coats, wide-leg trousers and structured pieces arrive at their shapes through draping rather than drawing; the silhouette follows the fabric. She smooths out a silk-mix sample that springs back into shape. “You need a certain composition so that the crease holds if you take it to the dry cleaner,” she explains. She asked her mill to add silk to their corduroy until it felt sufficiently slinky for dresses.
Meulendijks and Weyers met in 2000 at a bar in the southern Dutch village where she had grown up. She had just graduated from the Amsterdam Fashion Institute the year before; Weyers had been working at KPMG before joining forces with a friend to start a corporate finance and investment business. A year later they were sharing a small, ground-floor apartment in Amsterdam. Meulendijks’s first job after graduating was at Scotch & Soda, the Amsterdam label that turned bohemian casualwear into a global business, rising to lead Maison Scotch, Scotch & Soda’s womenswear line. It was watching Weyers’ independence at close range that crystallised her ambitions for a label of her own. “He’s always been my inspiration,” she says. “Finally, thank you,” Weyers says, deadpan.
The brand she had been carrying in her head since her Scotch & Soda days finally took shape in 2021, named Róhe after the Norwegian word for calm (ro). The question of where to base it answered itself when the listing for Herengracht 476 appeared through Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser, a heritage foundation that owns and preserves significant Dutch buildings. It had stood empty for two years. Meulendijks came to view it and the De Wit ceilings settled the matter. “It hit me. It was magical,” she says.
Huis de Vicq is rented from the foundation, and it also takes care of the ornamental garden, with its spiralled box hedging and rose arches. “Everything here is protected, so not a lot can be changed, understandably. But we were able to add freestanding steel elements to the original kitchen, to bring it up to date without disturbing the past,” Meulendijks says. “Similarly, we worked with an expert in historical textiles to select a beautiful silk jacquard for the wall panels in the house. My love for fabrics swelled even more after that interior project.”
The room in which she works doubles as the brand’s showroom. It is evidence of a life lived in Amsterdam: pieces by Veri Wisman, a 79-year-old neighbour who sculpts in bronze; objects by Louis Crombag, whose stone candleholders line the shelves, and a wooden desk made by Arne Kristian who works in the Veluwe national park. Everything in the room is connected to a person they know. “It’s really our lives,” Meulendijks says. Twenty-five years of collected art and ceramics are constantly moving back and forth between Huis de Vicq and the couple’s neo-renaissance house overlooking the Vondelpark.
They intend to transport some of this mood across the Atlantic to their first standalone store, which opens this month in New York’s SoHo, with Toteme, Dries Van Noten and Alaïa for neighbours. The 77 Mercer Street building, like Huis de Vicq, is bedecked with Corinthian columns, albeit in cast iron rather than stone. America already accounts for 30 per cent of Róhe’s wholesale business. “We want to grow that further,” Meulendijks says.
The 220sq m space will have a communal desk at the front and fitting rooms designed “like bedrooms” – large, warmly lit and furnished with care – and there will be multiple examples of Dutch craftsmanship. With every purchase there’s a ritual: the customer seated, drinks offered, the tissue, box and ribbon assembled in front of them. “We want to take the customer into a slower pace, instead of the pace of New York.” She smiles. “Let’s see.”
Travelling with them is a 1550 portrait by Hans Eworth that the couple acquired at the Pan Amsterdam art fair. The identity of its sitter is currently under investigation by a London-based specialist in Old Masters. “She’s the mystery woman,” Meulendijks says. “Also very beautiful.” Shades of her textiles – “her black velvet dress, cheetah fur, fine lace and poplin, the sheer workmanship and subtle layers” – have influenced the fabric design for the AW26 collection, which will make its debut at the New York store opening.
Neither Meulendijks nor Weyers is naturally drawn to the spotlight. They are, as Meulendijks puts it, “behind-the-scenes people – working with our hands, building up.” Ideally, Róhe and its clothing should do all the communication. “We hate loud,” she says. They made an exception last September when, after 25 years together, they got married in a multi-venue urban safari across Amsterdam. The canal-facing balustrade of Herengracht 476 was adorned with a giant bow in raw silk – “the same quality as my wedding dress”, says Meulendijks, who wore five outfits across two days, each one Róhe, including a jacket with the house’s signature pankou closure. The bridal capsule that followed was a hit.