Laakhaven on a Wednesday Afternoon: Studios, Light, and What It Means to Have a Workspace

I’ve had my live-work studio in Laakhaven for three years. I chose it because the rent was manageable, the ceilings were high enough to think in, and the building had other people in it who were trying to make something. Those three things still apply.

Laakhaven is Den Haag’s old industrial waterfront — the Laak harbour, former factories, warehouses that were converted into studios and workshops during the years when the rents were low enough to take a chance on. That window is narrowing, which is the thing everyone in the collective talks about in the way you talk about something that hasn’t ended yet but has clearly started ending.

The collective I work from is in a converted warehouse on Saturnusstraat. Fifteen studios — graphic designers, illustrators, a ceramicist, a sound artist, a textile artist who joined last month from Rotterdam. The building has the specific quality that good working buildings have: you can hear other people working without it being intrusive. Someone’s printer going. A door. Music from one studio down. The low evidence of occupation.

On Wednesday afternoon I was finishing a brand identity project for a restaurant opening in Laakhaven in May — a client who found me because they’re in the same building, which is how most of my good projects start. The light in my studio between three and five is the reason I chose the specific space. North-facing, consistent, no direct sun but enough of it to work without artificial light until past six in summer. I notice it every time I’m in there at that hour.

The neighbourhood around the studios has been changing. Binckhorst, just south of Laakhaven, is being developed rapidly — new housing, new offices, the kind of construction that precedes the kind of rent increases that make collectives like ours viable for a few more years before they aren’t. We’ve had one approach from a coworking company wanting to buy into the building. The collective voted no. Not because it was obviously wrong, but because the thing we have is specific and the thing they were offering was general, and you can’t go back once you’ve made that trade.

The Maakhaven open studios in June will be the first time the full collective shows together. I’m designing the visual identity for it — posters, signage, a small catalogue. It’s the most personal project I’ve taken on in a year, which is strange given that it’s for a building I already live in. But that’s how it works: you’re inside something for long enough that you stop being able to see its shape, and then someone asks you to represent it and you have to look at it properly again.

The Laakhaven waterfront itself is worth a walk if you haven’t been. The Saturnusstraat area has studios, small production businesses, a couple of places to eat if you know where they are. It’s not a destination neighbourhood yet. That status is probably coming, which is what makes it worth visiting now. Saturnusstraat, Laakhaven, Den Haag.