Louise Snouck Hurgronje is a theater producer (she runs an immersive theater company called Amsterdam on Stage) and an antiques dealer (she’s in the process of co-founding an antiques business called Playhouse Amsterdam). And she says she has a love of “collecting preloved and vintage furniture and knickknacks,” all of which fill the gorgeous 17th-century canal house she’s owned for three years in the center of Amsterdam with Alexander Wijs.
“When we first entered this house before buying it, it felt like we had stepped back in time,” Louise begins. “The house was in its original state, with all the 17th-century walls and floors, and books were piled high in every room. My partner and I both adore objects with history and fell completely in love with the home and its atmosphere.”
“We have spent the last three-and-a-half years carefully collecting treasures to fill it with. We didn’t want to renovate or alter the house at all; it is precious to us as we found it. Its tiny, narrow little Amsterdam staircase may be considered a death-trap by friends, but these are the details we love so dearly about it.”
Although the couple kept lots of vintage vibes in the space, they say they also “wanted to imprint our own style into the space, but we very much adore the old feel of the house. We have now assembled an eclectic mix of furniture from different centuries and aesthetics.”
“Someone once commented, ‘Nothing Matches, but it works.’ And that is very much how we love to live. Everything has a story — whether it is the bench in the kitchen, which we bought from an antiques dealer in the street, to the mirror, which my godmother gifted us for our wedding. Every room sparks joy for us, and that is the intention with which we fill them,” Louise describes.
Louise says the home’s previous owners had not renovated in the 70 years that they had lived here. “This meant that the house was still completely intact, with all the original flooring and walls. We did, however, have to slightly modernize the kitchen and add bathrooms (they were still of the generation to have sinks in every room to wash rather than proper bathrooms!).”
“Every renovation choice we made was centered around the aim to make it look as ‘old’ as possible — with the result being a kitchen which looks like it has been there forever (according to friends!).”
Recent moves in UK debt markets, where gilt yields have risen even though interest rates are being cut and the pound is falling, suggest that cracks may be appearing in Britain's reserve currency status, a credit rating agency has warned. A sharp sell-off in UK gilts earlier this month brought reminders of the 2022 "mini-budget" crisis, when the Conservative government of then-prime minister Liz Truss tried to ram through unfunded tax cuts. Dennis Shen, a top analyst at Scope Ratings, the only major agency headquartered in Europe, said evidence that the UK was becoming more vulnerable to these kinds of emerging market-style sell-offs would be a sign its AA rating may not be as robust as it once was.
Markets are significantly underestimating the chance that the Bank of England will have to step up the pace of cutting interest rates, Goldman Sachs has argued. Traders anticipate just two interest rate cuts this year with one more cut priced in for 2026, which would leave the benchmark Bank Rate at 4.0 per cent. It
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President Donald Trump vowed to eliminate the electric-vehicle mandate in his inaugural address, although strictly speaking, there is no mandate. “We will end the Green New Deal, and we will revoke the electric-vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers,” said Trump in a speech from the Capitol. What he called the mandate refers to Environmental Protection Agency rules requiring auto makers to eventually sell all battery-electric vehicles to avoid hefty emissions-related fines.
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The billionaire founder and chief executive of Victorian Plumbing is in line for a huge pay day after his company decided to up his salary and potential bonus. The London AIM-listed company’s remuneration committee has decided to increase Mark Radcliffe’s base salary from £250,000 to £400,000 from 1 April, 2025. The committee has also increased
(Reuters) -EasyJet's shares dropped to their lowest level since October on Wednesday as the company flagged weaker revenue expectations for the second quarter, but the airline cut losses in the first quarter and kept its profit guidance for the year. EasyJet, the first UK airline to report results, produced a smaller first-quarter operating loss on easing fuel costs and strong passenger demand for travel and its holiday packages. "Looking to this summer, we have seen continuing demand for easyJet's flights and holidays where we have one million more customers already booked, with firm favourites like Palma, Faro and Alicante," new CEO Kenton Jarvis said in a statement.
On the corporate front, the recent selling of easyJet shares continued today despite the airline’s much smaller Q1 loss. JD Wetherspoon also reported a strong quarter of trading but warned it faces £60 million of additional wage costs.
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Rigetti Computing (RGTI) has been thrown in the limelight after Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang speculated that quantum computing is decades away. Just days later, Nvidia announced their own inaugural Quantum Day, set to take place on March 20 during the GTC 2025 event. Rigetti CEO Sudodh Kulkarni spoke with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi on Opening Bid about the company's outlook on the path to profitability. Kulkarni was more interested in hitting the cash flow break-even point, saying, "Assuming the timeline I described earlier holds, we certainly expect the company to start becoming cash flow break-even three to five years from now." Despite describing sufficient cash reserves for the next few years, he was non-committal about raising capital through stock offerings, focusing on the company's existing government contracts for future growth. For full episodes of Opening Bid, listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on our website. This post was written by Rachael Lewis-Krisky, producer for Opening Bid.