How ARE you?! Selling Sunset, Dutch style

Picture: Netflix

Bored, one Sunday afternoon in early 2004, I drove out of Amsterdam in the direction of Hilversum, a name you’ll know if you’ve ever owned a transistor radio as it was one of the pre-marked positions embossed on tuning dials (the town being the Netherlands’ self-styled ‘media city’ as home to most of the country’s broadcasters due to its hilly position above a mostly below-sea level landscape.

Dutch afternoons in February tend to close in early, so not fancying navigating uncharted waters in the wintry half light, I decided not to make the tour too long and navigated out of Hilversum in a looping direction back to Amsterdam. An arrow-straight tree-lined road took me through a picturesque, wooded area known as t’Gooi, passing bucolic communities which, judging by their properties, were home to the well to-do (media folk and Amsterdam financiers, no doubt) along with working farms. 

Somewhere before the road connected with the A2 spinal motorway that would take me back to the Dutch cultural capital, I made a decision that would prove to be fateful: I turned off the provincieweg and detoured into a cute village containing historic looking chalets, elegantly architectured townhouses and a windmill, with a river running right through it. 

© Simon Poulter 2022

Driving gingerly through minuscule streets I eventually squeezed across a bridge that seemed barely wide enough for a bicycle, let alone my car, and onto the opposing bank, passing through a neighbourhood of modern post-war housing. Eventually I found myself back on the main road and heading home to my one-bedroom shoe box in Amsterdam’s Oud Zuid (Old South). By the following spring, I’d decided that this apartment - which had only meant to be temporary refuge after I relocated from California - had become claustrophobic. 

I asked the relocation agent who’d helped find it what the housing market was like in Amsterdam’s outer suburbs, having in mind something with a bit of space to house my America-fattened library of CDs and DVDs, and my modest collection of guitars and other musical accoutrements that had been in storage since arriving in the country. A shortlist of six houses was drawn up, with visits planned to all of them in the space of a single Tuesday. The sixth and final property was in the village I’d taken a detour through just a few months before. This was the house that I made my home that July.

Last week, after 18 years of ownership, I said goodbye to it. Circumstances have prevailed in the intervening years, eventually returning to London after 17 years abroad and, now, with a wife and a home of our own to maintain. My little bolthole in the Dutch countryside had become superfluous to requirements. That’s life.

Now, don’t get me wrong: selling up was bittersweet. I’d never owned an actual house before, just a flat in Surbiton (and various rentals and flatshares), so there was something satisfying about coming home each night to my own front door, my own living room, kitchen, upstairs bedroom and a converted attic that was my home office and imaginary music studio. In the spring, summer and even early autumn, the house had an Italian-style garden at the back in which to chill out, especially after coming home from work. And then there were the neighbours: I can’t speak highly enough of the families who lived around me, who welcomed this lone Englishman into their midst in the summer of 2004 (and put up with his English-speaking ignorance and occasional, futile attempts to converse in Dutch). Even towards the end of the selling process, they were of enormous help, taking care of things I was unable to do from London. If there was one downside, it was that - as rural villages go - it could be a little cut off. Amsterdam was only 20km away (the skycrapers of the city’s south-eastern business district could be seen in the distance across billiard table-flat fields), but unless you had a car, you may as well have been living on the moon. With a car, commuting and socialising was easier than it is here in London, with its nose-to-nose packed morning trains and choked city streets. 

© Simon Poulter 2022

Still, though, handing over the keys to the house’s new owners brought a mixture of emotions. I was delighted, first, to have sold the house in a steadily flattening market, but secondly to a young couple just starting out on the property ladder. They, too, were moving out of the city. But even on the morning of the handover, I was reminded acutely of how life in the area was just so unrushed, despite being close to one of Europe’s liveliest cities - buying champagne for my neighbours in the picturesque village of Abcoude or stopping for a coffee in the timeless marketplace of Breukelen, just down the road (and the town from which New York’s Brooklyn gets its name).

I grew up in a village, albeit a London suburb (where I live again today) which the locals call ‘The Village’. It isn’t one, of course - just another piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is conurbated London - but you see what they mean. In our street there is a similar sense of the neighbourliness I experienced in my Dutch village, wherein neighbours both know your business, but also would do anything for you when called upon. It’s almost from another time.

The process to sell the house was as accelerated as it was to buy it in the first place. With the Dutch summer break fast approaching, not to mention the cost-of-living crisis threatening to deflate the country’s property market, I needed to move quickly. Here’s where my force-of-nature estate agent Gwen came to the fore. We’d been in touch for several years, dating back to a time when - as these cycles go - Dutch property was undergoing another of its capricious periods. I kept my patience. When the time came to get on with selling, Gwen connected me with all the decorators, repairmen, gardeners and cleaners I would need to ensure it was in tip-top condition, operating at a remote distance from the UK to get the house ready for sale. Simply put, it just happened. 

For a profession as maligned as estate agents, Gwen was diligent to the core. Mine may not have been the biggest house sale she’ll ever preside over, particularly in an area containing million euro mansions, but even with my modest little drum, I felt like I was being given top priority. Even more so, given that much of the process was being handled in a language different to mine (though the Dutch gift for linguistics meant that my laziness was tolerated throughout).

Contrast my experience with the disturbingly addictive Selling Sunset reality shows on Netflix. They have become a fixture in our house. I would like to say that it is my wife and step-daughter who watch them, with me occasionally looking up from my iPad and harumphing, but that would be a bare-faced lie. 

For the uninitiated, Selling Sunset, and its new sibling Selling Sunset OC, are fly-on-the-wall shows about the Oppenheim Group, a high-end estate agency operating in the rarified echelons of Los Angeles’ priciest neighbourhoods and, latterly, the equally expensive coastal cities of Orange County, to LA’s south. Looking at these trash TV series from one viewpoint, I know LA very well and we recently had the final component of our honeymoon in the OC’s Huntington Beach (dining out in places like Laguna Beach and Balboa Island, which feature in the show), so seeing familiar sights is a draw. But those who’ve seen the shows will know that’s not what draws in the viewers: it’s the absolute bitchfest that ensues each episode as they focus as much on the interpersonal chaos between the ‘cast’ of estate agents (and, evidently, wannabe actors), with their obvious cosmetic enhancements, as they gouge each others eyes out (metaphorically, but I wouldn’t put it past them actually gouging a rival’s eyes) in pursuit of their cut of a mult-million dollar house sale. And seeing as one house in Selling Sunset OC went for over $106,000,000 you can understand the blood thirsty ambition. My eyes are still watering from that.