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Eindhoven occupies an unusual position in the Dutch imagination. For much of the twentieth century it was synonymous with Philips, the electronics giant that effectively built the modern city from a modest market town, funding hospitals, housing and cultural institutions in a paternalistic arrangement that left a permanent mark on the urban fabric. That industrial legacy has not been erased so much as repurposed, and the city that emerges today is one of Europe's more credible design capitals, home to the Dutch Design Week each autumn and to a graduate academy, Design Academy Eindhoven, whose alumni have shaped interiors, objects and ideas across the continent.

The clearest expression of this reinvention sits at Strijp-S, the former Philips factory complex in the west of the city that was once so secretive it was known locally as the Forbidden City. The red-brick industrial buildings have been converted into studios, galleries, music venues and restaurants, and the neighbourhood draws a younger, creative crowd that gives it an energy quite different from the polished canal-side tourism of Amsterdam or Utrecht. Nearby, the city centre clusters around the Markt and the Catharinakerk, a Gothic church that survived the heavy Allied bombing of 1944 and remains one of the few genuinely old structures in a city that had to rebuild itself almost from scratch after the Second World War.