In the 1960s, modernism came to the middle classes via a little rabbit with a cross for a nose

So where can you go now to have a fag with your pint? Try Holland, where just a few minutes in a cafe will leave you with that classic bonfire scent clinging to knitwear and hair. Holland is essentially an unreconstructed place. Shops have psychedelic writing outside and giant hookahs inside. Yet it's not some smelly student den. It looks like a carefully arranged stage set. Style is paramount. They may all still be smoking their heads off, but the Dutch know how to arrange a city centre. Everything is illuminated by the same calm wash of light detectable in a Vermeer canvas. Everything is perfectly proportioned, even municipal buildings. The city theatre in Utrecht, for example, has flagpoles cut to match exactly the height of the roof.

Naturally, designers are top of the pile here. I was in Utrecht (along with the Dutch royal family) to witness the opening of the Dick Bruna Huis, a museum built to celebrate the children's illustrator and local hero, now 78. Bruna still cycles daily to his studio, where he draws puppies, pigs and chickens in his famously distilled style. His central character is a little line-drawn bunny, Miffy, whose face is concocted from two dots and a cross. Bruna first drew Miffy in 1956; more than 70 books and thousands of associated products later, the brand is worth $300m a year.

Utrecht makes much of the fact that Bruna is the city's second design king; it is also home to the modernist architect Gerrit Rietveld, whose famous white-and-glass Schroderhuis, built in 1924 to the principles of de Stijl and now a World Heritage Site, sits on a residential street.

Intriguingly, the two men are fundamentally linked: the success of one designer probably led to the fortune of the other. The Miffy Museum, as it will doubtless become known, credits Bruna's global triumph to his having unleashed Miffy at a time when the middle classes were becoming fully aware of the clean lines and unornamented design of Rietveld and his followers.

"In the postwar years there were many young mothers and fathers," reads the museum blurb. "These were the days of light and air. The theories of pre-war architects such as Rietveld were at last reaching the general public. Ambitious families furnished their houses with furniture in primary colours, combined with glass and steel. Bruna's designs conformed to this trend." It's true; as a 1960s child myself, I remember Bruna books scattered over our low-slung orange Habitat sofa, and reading them in a kitchen decorated with strict adherence to primary colours. Even the milk jug was blue and white.

Of course, another Bruna plus-point is that not only did he introduce the principles of de Stijl design to the under-fives, but his characters remain unrelated to the empire of Disney, W. Occasionally it's just nice to escape the world domination of Mickey and friends, particularly for us girls. In a week when Hollywood has been bemoaning the absence of female leads in animated films (think Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Shark Tale and Shrek, which are all boy-led), it was a thrill to be present at the canonisation of a female cartoon role model, although Bruna has admitted it was only in the sixth book (published in 1970) that he gave Miffy a flowery dress, and thus a gender.

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