The Dutch are a moderate people. Our economy grew in a moderate way, and it will fall in a moderate way: We are not worried — so far,” said a gallerist from Amsterdam’s Willem Baars Art Projects. This rosy (and refreshing) outlook reverberated throughout the 75 booths at Art Rotterdam, which celebrates its 10th edition this year, running February 5 to 8. However, precautions had been taken. Willem Baars, which had already sold several pieces by the fair’s opening, admitted they had brought smaller and less expensive works on paper, for example, and indeed, most of the work in Art Rotterdam was priced at less than €15,000 ($19,400).

But small can be beautiful, and the bustling fair, housed inside Rotterdam’s scalloped Cruise Terminal on the wide, gray Maas river, exuded conviviality on opening night on February 4 — as well as serious collecting. “Every important Dutch collector is here!” effused Berlin's Andreas Wiesner, whose Kunstagenten gallery was displaying new candy-colored photographs by Thorsten Brinkmann, who was recently selected for the ICP Triennial in New York this fall.

According to Art Rotterdam co-director Michael Huyser, of Hof and Huyser gallery in Amsterdam, the fair, while very locally focused (over 40 of the 75 participating galleries are from the Netherlands), is growing. “We had 170 applications this year,” he said, “and are expecting 500 foreign visitors.” He admitted that three galleries had pulled out due to economic troubles, but was happy to point out newcomers like New York’s Mireille Mosler, Milan’s Pianissimo, and London’s Seventeen and Paradise Row. “The identity of Art Rotterdam is set,” he explained. “In the coming years, I hope to offer more of the same: established Dutch galleries alongside cutting-edge international galleries.” He added, “I don’t want the fair to become larger. Keeping it intimate and high-quality is important.”

Frédéric Leris, from Paradise Row, was very happy with the show. “It feels very young and fresh here, and there’s a lot of new faces. There’s not the showing off and extreme focus on money, names, and investments like in London. Dutch collectors seem to collect for the sake of collecting and to take their time to think about it — and it seems that everyone here is a collector!” Indeed, besides a high turnout of Dutch collectors, Art Rotterdam was expecting 50 collectors from the Museé d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and 200 from an ING-affiliated group in Brussels, as well as an Italian group attached to the Manifesta biennial.

As for what was on view, photography, drawing, and figurative painting abounded — which of course helped to keep prices reasonable. Michael Wolfs chilling Chicago cityscapes at Amsterdam’s Wouter van Leeuwen were priced between €6,900 and €9,500, and Sylvie Zijlmanss hyper-real still-life photographs at Haarlem’s Galerie Tanya Rumpff were on offer for even less. You could count the number of works in video and installation on one hand; a visiting French curator commented that this made it seem too commercial, but it is, after all, a fair.

Across the street, in a sleek white building, is Object Rotterdam, a design fair running concurrently with Art Rotterdam for the first time. A pilot version of Object Rotterdam was held in 2007, but the fair has been rethought, thematically honed, and enlarged, re-launching this year with 20 booths. While overwhelmingly Dutch (18 of the booths are from the Netherlands, with one each from Copenhagen and Milan), Object Rotterdam specializes in “autonomous design” and is the first fair to do so. As Li Edelkoort, former chairwoman of the world-famous Design Academy Eindhoven, explained, “autonomous design” (which doesn’t have anything to do with “autonomy” per se, but is an awkward translation) focuses on small editions and hand-crafting, as opposed to industrial production. Edelkoort, who curated a booth of young and established Eindhoven designers for the city’s Designhuis art space, forecasts a return to the handiwork-based Arts and Crafts movement; the use of humbler, recycled materials; and new technologies like laser. This approach is well represented by the work of the Amsterdam design outfit Droog, whose iconic stacked chest of drawers (included in MoMAs collection) was displayed near the entrance, as well as by the famed 400-year-old earthenware production company Royal Tichelaar Makkum, whose booth presented contemporary riffs on traditional Delftware (white dishes hand-painted with blue bombs, dice, and trombones, for example).

Running the fairs side-by-side was Huyser’s idea. Last year he took a group of art collectors around to young designers’ studios in Rotterdam. “They really loved it,” he said. For a city like Rotterdam, which boasts such architecture and design giants as Rem Koolhaass OMA, Atelier van Lieshout, and the young firm Demakersvan, not to mention a profusion of cutting-edge design boutiques and art institutions, the marriage of art and design was an obvious choice. And while both shows are more local than international, they shared a sense of enduring, sustainable support, a stark contrast to the breakneck boom and bust of so many other fairs.

Lyra Kilston is Senior Editor of Modern Painters.