The World Vegan Travel Podcast
The World Vegan Travel Podcast
Netherlands Vegan Luxury: Hotel Bent | Karin Bruers
In today’s episode of The World Vegan Travel Podcast, we’re joined by Karin Bruers, the cultural, social, and sustainable entrepreneur behind Hotel Bent in the Netherlands. Karin shares the story of how she transformed a simple idea into a beautiful vegan boutique hotel nestled in a forested area near Eindhoven and Amsterdam. We’ll talk about her inspiration, the challenges of building a fully sustainable space, and how Hotel Bent is gently influencing the local community to embrace plant-based living. Whether you're dreaming of your next eco-conscious getaway or curious about what it takes to run a truly sustainable hotel, you won’t want to miss this conversation.
🌿 We're heading back to Vietnam in 2026 and you're invited! A few spots are still available — Click here to learn more and book.
📸 Follow our adventures on Instagram: @worldvegantravel
Check out our website | Check out all the podcast show notes | Follow us on Instagram
Brighde: Hello Karen. Welcome to The World Vegan Travel Podcast.
Karin: I am so delighted, Brighde. I really like it. I'm just from this little village in Holland, and then I'm in this international podcast.
Brighde: I am so thrilled to have you on the podcast because you have accomplished something that I know from our little onboarding call a little while ago, was quite a challenge. And that is opening up a 100%, and really very mindfully built, and sustainable hotel in the Netherlands. So I want to talk all about that. What was it, Karen, that inspired you to want to build Hotel Bent?
Karin: Well, it's more than this internal motivation. It's not that I was thinking what should I do? It was normal. I have two daughters, and we live in this village. We are vegan, but if you want to eat vegan, you cannot eat vegan or they give you a plate, they take away the meat, and you get some french fries and salad. When you come into a restaurant, you see them, 'Oh, that's vegan. How are we going to do this?' We are pain in the ass in restaurants, and we are pain in the ass with our friends and family. They almost don't invite us to come for dinner because it's so complicated. Sometimes people say, 'Well, then I make something with chicken.' No, chicken is an animal. So we have to explain. Then I sold a very nice place I had in the town, in Corona. And we had some money, and we said, 'What shall we do with this? We have to give this back to society.' And then we said, 'Let's make a vegan restaurant. Not too big, 50, maximum 60 persons. And just to make people aware that vegan is very nice food. Everybody eats vegan, and then you have a piece of meat, but the rest is all vegan. And the word vegan is also negative. So we have a plant-based kitchen. We started to build a restaurant, but then one of my daughters said why don't we build a little boutique hotel that we build all sustainable, and show the people that you can be luxury, and comfortable, and good meals, and you didn't kill an animal, you didn't hurt nature. We said, 'Let's go for it.' And every time we got more enthusiastic and the people around us got enthusiastic. So they came with ideas. Yeah. The community thought it was a great idea.
Brighde: Okay. Yeah.
So Karen, I know, in business, and in bureaucracy, and with local governments, wheels can move very slowly. We have to do all of these planning and regulation checks. Did you have many challenges when it came to building this hotel?
Karin: I did it with an architect, of course, and this architect communicated every time with the counselor, the people who work in the administration, and they said we could do this and like that. And I did it exactly like the rules. And then suddenly at the end of this process, they needed also a nitrogen report. So we put this in the permit and I got this permit. So I thought, I have everything now, and I did it right, and I didn't pass a rule, nothing. So I can start building. But normally you have to wait six weeks until it's definite because people can have complaints about it. And yes, our neighbors had complaints, but a lot of complaints. One of the complaints was that the nitrogen document wasn't okay. So they took me to court. They wanted me to stop building, and the judge, he said, 'I have to stop you building until you have this file, this document.' And this became a hell for one and a half years. I've been to court three times. I've been for big commissions many times. What's so frustrating, is that the way I build with all secondhand materials, the tiles on the roof, the bricks and everything. We try to build with a lot of electric material. They stop me every time. And even the governments, the local governments. There are no rules there. There's no little door where you can go in a little green door because I'm from the green economy. We say you have the black economy and you have the green economy, and we all want to go to the green economy. But then you have to provide. They put me next to the black economy with the farmers. We take away nitrogen, but the laws and the rules are not made yet for people like us. So they stopped me for one and a half years, and with a lot of lawyers and a lot of money, and ecologist and everything, we had to convince our local administration. And then they felt a bit embarrassed, I think, after one and a half year because it came in the newspaper. People got angry, and there was this little law changed. So I built it without fuel or electric. It was okay with the big material. All the trucks, everything we do, it's electric. Except the plumbers and the painters, they have their own little buses they come in. So I rented some buses that they could use. But one, two days they did, but the third day they came with their own bus that was on fossil fuel because they had to go to another job, and it was easy to come with their bus. So it was so difficult to do this. We are in a transition to electric and not using fuel energy. And then after a while I said, let's do this. It's a transition. If I get problems with the local authorities, they have to admit we cannot do it all. But I did a lot.
Brighde: There's not the systems in place or the resources. It's almost like you were setting a precedent. It reminds me of our friends. They have an elephant sanctuary in the southwest of France, and Europe had never had an elephant sanctuary before, that is a home for rescued elephants from circuses and zoos and things like that. And it's a really important thing because a lot of laws are changing in regards to the keeping of elephants in circuses, et cetera. But there needs to be a home for them to go to when finally people aren't allowed to have elephants in circuses anymore. Like they've got a few years to figure out what to do with them. And then this sanctuary wants to open up. Run by extremely qualified people, but they had to just fight every step of the way because no one had ever done anything like this before. And for better or worse, the EU is quite highly regulated.
Karin: If they only go by the rules, we don't need them. We can put everything in artificial intelligence and they know all the rules and law, but why people, humans are doing this? The society changes. You have the elephant thing. Like what I do, you need human minds to think about that, that we are in a transition. You have to be flexible. You have to be quick, you have to change and things. And the law and the rules go so slowly. That's why I was quite frustrated. I said, 'How can you stop this?' I take away nitrogen. We don't eat meat. I take away CO2.Everything I do. I make all new plants and trees I put in my garden. And they looked at me. Yeah. But the rules, no.
Brighde: So you finally did it. You, I don't know how you did it, to fight on that for a year and a half, and I'm sure it was financially excruciating. I'm sure it was. But you have done it, and you are now open. So tell me about the hotel, what it physically looks like, and how many rooms, and the amenities.
Karin: We have eight rooms and the rooms are quite big, 25 or 30 square meters, and the biggest is 70 square meters. That's a studio. We have four studios. They have a little kitchen or they have a kitchen. Then two suites, they're a bit bigger, and you have a bath and a room. And then you have eight very nice rooms. And the bed is quite big because we have some friends. In Holland, we have very tall people. They are two meters, so the beds are quite big, two meter 20 by two meters. And everybody say, 'Oh. We can swim in the bed.'
Brighde: Oh, wow!
Karin: And there is some antique. We have the cupboards, we have beautiful antique cupboards, and we clean them all with scent.
I love art. I have a lot of friends who do art, so there's a lot of art in the hotel. I designed the sofa and I called it social sofa. And we do all mosaics, and there are thousands also all over the world. So there's a lot of mosaic things in the bathrooms, in sofas, the entrance. It's very picturesque. If you see, because we used all secondhand materials, it looks like it has always been there. It has a nice garden. If you cross the street, you are in a big forest with little lakes and a lot of animals. Flowers in the water, water lilies. A lot of little fruits. It's about two meter, one and a half kilometer, I don't know, miles from the center. And the center is Osterback, and it's really a lot of shops, expensive shops. We have a lot of millionaires in the village.
Brighde: Oh, it's fancy.
Karin: A lot of restaurants and a lot of galleries, art galleries. We have 15 international guests, artists that make ceramic because we have one of the biggest ovens in Europe. So my hotel is very picturesque. It fits completely with nature, but it's built out of wood and bricks on the outside. So prefab wood on the inside. So sometimes you hear the wood that's expanding. And it smells
Brighde: like wood. And yes, I love it a lot. Everybody feels at home because it's not big, Yes.
I would love to talk a little bit more specific questions about the hotel. You said that you have eight rooms?
Karin: There are eight rooms, two suites, and four studios. So yes. If you like to do your own kitchen, you can.
Brighde: I see. Okay. So you've got, all of these rooms, but you are also going to have a restaurant as well. So will that restaurant be just for breakfast or will it be open for lunch and dinner? What kind of food will be served there?
Karin: It's vegan. It's for breakfast. Breakfast is very important because we are a hotel, so it needs to be a very good breakfast. And now we also do breakfast for the eight rooms. Sometimes people don't know they come to a vegan restaurant and they don't know that the breakfast is vegan. There's so many things you can eat.
If you don't know it's vegan, you only notice that there's no egg. We have lunches. And in the lunches, the people from the village and outside can come to visit us. And we have dinner, but our dinner is more shared dining because I want people to get acquainted with vegan foods. So they can taste a lot.
Brighde: Ah, so it's like family style.
If you like
Karin: it, you get the recipe because I want people to make vegan at home. A part of my career is in theater. So every two weeks there are performances of standup comedians or musicians or singers or, it's really also a cultural place. Yeah. It sounds so fun, and I love the idea that you have the hotel, which of course is vegan, and is going to attract vegans, but also hopefully non-vegan as well. And the town, it doesn't seem so big. I'm sure from a business perspective, it's great because all of those vegans are gonna eat their breakfasts, probably their lunch and their dinner with you. Yeah.
Brighde: You're really smart.
Karin: Yeah. What is very nice is the restaurants around me, they put now on their menu card some vegan plates.
Brighde: That happens quite a lot I
Karin: see.
So that's very nice. We are a bit becoming influencers. On my age, I become an influencer, a vegan influencer. Yeah.
Brighde: Fantastic. So you built this hotel from the ground up and you knew from the beginning that you wanted to make it vegan, and you wanted to make it built as sustainably as possible. So can you tell me about some of the choices that you made in the design and the construction process to make sure that the hotel met your vision. In terms of being 100% vegan and as sustainable as possible, because you've made some choices that I don't think many, even people with the best of intentions would be prepared to do.
Karin: First thing we decided to do a prefab, and the base is prefab from wood. They make it in the factory, and it's the most sustainable way to build because they can use everything. There's not a lot of waste. In one week they build a floor. So in three weeks, the three floors were built. So there's not a lot of working traffic. We use so much wood, we had two big fields, we bought, and they restored a forest on these fields. So it's a young forest, but it's something to compensate the use of the wood. Then I always use six criteria in the things I decide. For example, what is the resource? You say, what's the material? Where does the material come from? Then how is the fabric? How do you make it? What do you make it? How do you do this? Then it is, how they transport it to us. How far is it? Things like this. Then how strong is it? How long will it last? For example, the floor. What do I put on the floor? I can put tiles. And tiles is nice because the heat is going in very quickly and it heats the room quick. If I use secondhand wood, that's very sustainable. The resource and the way it comes to me, et cetera. But the warmth goes very slow through the wood, so it would cause me more electricity. I have earthworms, and so the pump has to use a lot of electricity. So then there's this material I decided to use. It's a kind of PVC. Then in the PVC, I look for the most sustainable. It's the most sustainable and the warm passes through. So like this, I decide, and also one thing is, when we want to change, can we change it or not? And in this time of transition, you cannot have a 10 on every aspect. You cannot. We are not that far in our society. So I make this, and then I say, okay, this is a ten, this is a three, this is five. Sometimes it's better to get something from farther. The transportation is more heavy, but the use and everything is a 10. We decided how to build and what to do. And like the gardener, I say to the gardener, what I want you to do is the forest. I want a copy of the forest here, so it's completely biodiverse and climate adaptive. So all the water can fall in. We flush the toilets with the rain water. But it's so beautiful. It's so nice. It's so luxury. We have a lot of startups, beautiful startups who do these kind of things. It's nice to meet them because we are all kind of soulmates. We enjoy it.
Brighde: I'm looking at your website right now and it's just lovely. It's so beautifully thought out. It's comfortable, it's tasteful. It just seems very natural and when I look at it, I feel very calm. I think we are all looking to find that when we are traveling .I can't imagine how many decisions you needed to make and how difficult each one was to make. I really applaud your commitment. Because I don't know if I could have done it.
Karin: Churchill once said, 'If you go through hell, you keep on going, you keep on going.' And that's what we did.
Brighde: Right. Wow. Let's make sure our listeners know why they should come to this beautiful part of the world and stay in this hotel. I'm sure everyone listening to this is 'Oh, okay, I really want to go to Hotel Bent. It sounds lovely.' What is there to do in the surrounding area? Let's start by maybe getting us situated. Where are you in relation to airports, in relation to Amsterdam or maybe other big cities that are around so people can think, 'Oh, I could go there for a few days as I'm visiting
Karin: Amsterdam.'
Yeah, we have a few airports in Holland. We are small and the nearest airport is Eindhoven, and Eindhoven is about 15, 20 minutes from my hotel. If you go to Schiphol, which is Amsterdam, it's about one hour, one hour 15, you are on Schiphol. Holland is very small. We are just one province. To get there is quite easy and we have a very good train transportation. So if at Schiphol, at the airport, you take the train and you are in less than an hour, you are in my village. The train station is about one and a half kilometer from my hotel, but we arrange transportation. So we can pick you up. And in my village we also have this taxi company, this cab company, and they have all electric cars. We work together with them. They can pick them up at the airport and take them to our place, and bring them back. And we live in this village and it's nice. It's picturesque, it's very lovely. You have these lakes, et cetera. But we are about 15 kilometers from  Eindhove. And Eindhoven is, a brainport. A lot of brain things. They have Design Academy and there's Philips, the factory of Philips and the headquarters. So that's a very modern city. You have this big cathedral. That was also an inspiration. And the bults is really a kind of little medieval place. In 45 minutes, you are in Antwerp. Antwerp is really such a beautiful, creative, town. It's in Belgium, and if you go one and a half hour, bit shorter, you are in Brussels. If you go one hour, one hour and a half maximum, you are at the sea, at The Hague, where is also the international court. I love The Hague so much. It's so beautiful. You notice that it's a government city. It's completely different like Amsterdam. Amsterdam is, it's hippie. It's freedom. It's a lot of coffee shops, so you can smoke a joint, things like this. A lot of beers, everybody's on a bicycle. All the children are in the basket in front of the bicycle. Amsterdam is hippie, but it also has the Rijksmuseum, you know, the Rembrandts and the Ruben. You have so many museums. It's amazing. Also for photo exhibitions. What's his name? Famous singer. Not what, I tried to sing a song, but it's.. But Amsterdam, yeah, Amsterdam is nice. You have to visit Amsterdam with all it's markets and it's a little shops. It's little gardens. I like Amsterdam a lot. And then you have Rotterdam. Rotterdam has been bombed in the second World War. They had to rebuild it all. So this is a very modern city with big bridges, big big buildings. And there you have the harbor. Yeah, I think in Holland you have it all. The only thing you don't have in Holland are mountains. We don't have mountains because we are flat. We made Holland, you know. So it's really flat. That's why we can go on bicycles.
Brighde: I really love what you're saying, and when you were talking, I was looking at my little Google maps here on the other screen, and just getting a bit of a sense of the orientation. And Amsterdam is really quite far north, in a small country. But anyway, where you are located is really like very accessible for Luxembourg. You've got Brussels there and you've got Germany. It really is quite a great place if you want to explore the Benelux region, I feel.
Karin: If you put, for example, you do a hundred kilometers, I don't know, in miles, you are in Germany, you are in Belgium, you are in Amsterdam. It's so small. If you want to go to Paris, for example, from my place, you go to Antwerp, and there you get to train in two hours, and in in less than three hours you are in Paris. It's so close.
Brighde: Yeah. Yeah, it's excellent. And something that I was so curious about, something we talked about before we pressed record, is just how progressive the Netherlands is, compared with some other places. I was thinking about this, and I'm sure you'll be able to answer this question given your experience in constructing the hotel. You are very keen on building, of using electricity rather than fossil fuels to build things. But does that translate into like, how is the electricity produced in the Netherlands? Is it a lot of tidal energy or do they burn fossil fuels to make electricity in the Netherlands?
Karin: We have a problem with electricity in Holland. But a very strange problem because I have, for example, 45 solar panels here at my house. So all the summer months, and now March, we have a very beautiful March. I have my own energy, and also the neighbor and everybody now has this. So the electricity net is exploding. The infrastructure for this electricity, we do not have. So for the hotel, for example, I need three times 180 watts. But I can only get three times 160 watt. So we can only use the green energy. We have a lot of wind energy. We have a lot of the solar panels. So suddenly I was confronted with a very small amount of electricity. So I had to make decisions. And one of the decision is all the air conditioning is going out. And we changed with the warmth pump, that gives the cold in the summer, we decided not to have these electronic keys. We just have a normal key. And so we have cut out a lot of things. We have this dishwasher, and this was seven kilowatts. We had to change it back to three kilowatts. And so we were all and everything, downsizing. And now we are making, how you say this, when I use the kitchen, we don't use the boiler. And if we do the boiler in the evening and loading the cars that is going slowly, that can only do at night. So we are managing all our electricity. And today I was with a company that takes out energy in oxidation of iron and de-oxidation. Then you have warmth. And this warmth you can also use it as electricity. We can have energy out of something which is perpetual, which is, normally you use fuel, you use it, it's gone. You use gas and it's gone. But this recycles all the time. All the time. So I am loading the cars with energy. This taxi company has big batteries and has a lot of fields with solar panels. So he's going to fuel these batteries, and then every week he change the batteries so we can charge the cars. So I'm looking for how can we be with green electricity, but mostly to use less electricity. We became electricity junkies. Philips says sense and simplicity. That's the line. Sense and simplicity. It's simple, maybe, to put it in the..
Brighde: The socket.
Karin: But if you look behind it in your wall, and where it goes to, and then how it gets here, it's not simple at all, and it doesn't make sense. So the best is to get your energy around your place, and that it doesn't need to come from nuclear energy or coal mines or whatever. We have to be more self-providing.
Brighde: Yeah. I haven't been in the countryside in the Netherlands, but it's always very interesting for me when we are on our al zas trips and we cross the border into the black forest, into Germany. And then all of a sudden all of the houses have solar panels on them. And you just very quickly get the sense, because honestly, we don't see that many solar panels in North America and certainly not that many in Canada. And I'm sure, there's been a lot of government, and initiatives to encourage people to install these panels on their roofs. Is that correct?
Karin:
They subsidize it.
Karin: So they stimulated so much, that now the government is in problems because there's so much green energy, and we all give the green energy in the summer. And then we have too much because we don't need so much energy. And then in the winter there's a shortage because there's no sun. We have to invent how are we going to do the balance in between the seasons. Yes.
Oh, change is hard but worth it.
Karin: Worth it. Yes.
Brighde: Okay. What is your favorite dish that the kitchen is producing right now?
Karin: I
love
Brighde: Risotto. Okay.
Karin: Yes.
Brighde: Me too.
Me too. Okay. And what about beverages? Do you have a favorite beverage or something special?
Karin: Yeah, we make these smoothies, and you can choose the fruit from which you want to make a smoothie, and if not, we have some classic ones. And my daughter, she once had this education of cocktails in Miami. She's a philosopher, and the other side, so you know the conflict. And yeah, I love virgin cocktails. A Shirley Temple.
Brighde: Oh, I love it. I love it. And what is an activity close by to the hotel that people must do.
Karin: You cross the roads and you just wander there in our forest, and you sit by the lakes, and you watch the sunrise or the sunset. We have also a rooftop and you can lay in one of the chairs, and you see all the stars and top of the trees. Yeah. You have to connect with nature just to feel yourself. We put ourself above the ecological system, but we are part of it. And you feel it so much if you live in the forest, and you don't eat animals, and you see the stars, and, yes.
Brighde: Yeah. Oh, I love it. Is there a particular time of year that visitors should aim to come to stay at Hotel Bent? Maybe because there's a festival or an interesting time of year with the weather. What's a really great time of year?
Karin: I love springtime. All the green is popping out. All the flowers, the blossom, everything is popping out. It's so fresh. The sky is so blue. I love that season, but also in October when all the leaves get that colors, it's amazing. It's really beautiful. We have a lot of festivals because the young people don't go anymore to disco techs or to clubs. There are a lot of clubs closing. Everybody goes to festivals and all these kind of things. We have a lot of fairs. And we have a lot of markets, secondhand markets in the summer and in the spring. In the spring, everybody's coming out to meet each other. Everybody's sitting outside on the terraces. All the doors open. Everybody's talking. We like to drink. We like to eat. We like to talk. We like to sit, we like to chat.
Brighde: It's like a joie de vivre. I think that is so common in Europe. We have it a little bit in other places, I think, but Europe it so very
Karin: well.
And you know what's so funny about that? If you go to Spain and you go to Santa LucÃa, they to the south of Spain, they are much more like that. The North, if you see the bus country, they are more like this. And in every country in Holland. We are really the Italians of Holland. It's like this. And it's so funny. Every country in Europe, the South are the Italians of the country.
Brighde: I love it. All right. I'm sure we have convinced many people listening to this, that they really would love to come and stay at Hotel Bent. Can you explain to us how people might be able to book a stay with you? Right now you are still very in your early days of opening, so maybe things will change over time. Could you tell us how people can book right now, and how maybe you are going to open up to some different platforms or ways of booking in the future?
Karin: Our website, that's hotelbent.com, and you can make your reservation, but we are also on booking.com.I don't do these things, but you just go to our website.
Brighde: We are a small hotel, and then people sometimes write us. We are there because we are married 20 years or I come because I want to learn a script for a play that I'm going to do, and we like to know. I love it. Thank you, Karen. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast. It was a pleasure talking to you and learning all about this wonderful new accommodation in the Netherlands. Thank you.
Karin: very much.