Lavender, tea and a chair in the sun

Sometimes it's not the stall that makes the market. It's the chair next to it.

At every edition, we place a couple of old wicker chairs in a corner where the sun lingers longest. They're not announced. Nobody sells anything there. There's just a wooden sign that reads Sit down.

The effect we didn't foresee

Once someone sits down, they stay for ten to twenty minutes. People fetch tea from the Moroccan mint tea stall, set their bag on the ground and gaze out at the square. Some chat with their neighbor, others only with themselves. Everyone seems to have shed something—fatigue, hurry, the thought that they need to be somewhere else soon.

A market is not a shopping street

The shopping street wants you to keep moving. A good market wants you to stop every now and then. We believe an edition is truly successful only if visitors have sat down somewhere at least once without having to pay for it.

The chair is no minor detail. It is the heart.

For the summer editions, we're adding two more sitting corners. One beneath the old linden tree in Wassenaar, one behind the rose bush in Den Haag. We'll see you there.