Trading Porsches for a Houseboat and a Gentler Way of Life

This article is part of our Design special section about creating space with the look and feel for one person.

These days, the Dutch entrepreneur Rick Vintage lives alone on an old boat, a 75-foot-long vessel from 1895 called “Vrouwe Jacoba” ( Mrs. Jacoba, in Dutch) on a canal in a quiet corner of Amsterdam. It is moored in front of a 4,800-square-foot garden that contains a tiny house, now inhabited by his daughter Lux, 18, who comes on board mornings for coffee before dashing off to school. He lives with his dog, Moos. There are no passers-by, and he often dines alone on the deck. “I’ve always been a bit of a hermit,” he said in a video call from the Netherlands.

But it was not always so for Mr. Vintage, whose life was strikingly different only a few years ago. He founded his wallpaper business NLXL in 2010 with his wife, Esther Vintage, starting with images of wood planks for their beach house. “I put planks on the scanner, made prints and installed it in our living room,” he said. “I could smell it: This was going to be a worldwide success.”

But he worried that the design was too similar to work by Piet Hein Eek, whom he described as a design hero. “So I decided to send him a message to ask if he’d be interested in working with us.”

The boat is moored in front of a 4,800-square-foot garden that contains a tiny house inhabited by his daughter Lux.

They became partners on the design, called Piet Hein Eek Scrapwood Wallpaper. “I always make sure, in advance, that with whom I work it’s fun to work with and might be a friend. It turned out to be one of the most joyful collaborations till now and we’re friends now,” said Mr. Eek in an email.

The Vintages expanded their offerings, adding digitally printed trompe l’oeil patterns, including embossed tin and weathered concrete, and the company became an overnight success. “We acquired 3,000 resellers in 70 countries in one year and a half. And I became rich,” he said. He got to meet many designers he admired, including the English fashion luminary Paul Smith, who said upon being introduced, “I know who you are. You’re the wallpaper guy.” (Mr. Smith would later put NLXL wallpaper in the windows of his New York store, as would Saks Fifth Avenue.)