A dragon that breathes water, not fire 

Welcome to Willemijn’s World  

Do bland hotel rooms suck away your soul? In the Dutch city of Harlem, Willemijn de Lint offers a spectacular alternative. 

Her B&B is a tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top mosaic fantasy. Its walls and ceiling contain a three-dimensional gallery of voluptuous relief sculptures covered with mosaic tiles. She’s catering for guests who want their temporary residence to be an experience in itself.  

Here, the jacuzzi is part of a cave whose irregular walls and ceiling are covered in hundreds of little mirror tiles. You are drawn into a warm shower by the giant arms of an immense octopus that extend along the walls and ceiling outside. Or be refreshed with the cold water that emerges from the mouth of an intricately studded dragon. 

The dragon is a mirror-image of its maker’s spirit. Willemijn takes the scary out of scary things by embracing their beauty with humor. A graphic artist who worked for famous Dutch brands, she likes to be hands-on, whacky and inventive, challenging tradition, boundaries and reserve. This attitude can bump into bureaucratic roadblocks. She overlooked some city regulation or the other and had to close her first B&B last year and start to build a new one.  

MOSAIC AS EROTICA 

The original B&B was called Sin Suite and oriented towards clients who needed a discreet address. Jelly-like phalluses dripped from the ceiling in the toilet. Spermatozoa raced across the kitchen counter.  

She’s making the new B&B bigger and better and toning down the erotica.  

‘I want it to be put on the official monument list,’ she says.