Layered compounds with van der Waals bonding are an attractive playground for materials design. The idea that promising compounds may be created by combining 2D layers with various functionalities (magnetic, electronic, optical, etc.) by stacking them in a periodic 3D crystal lattice is being actively explored by chemists, physicists and theorists alike. However, the whole is seldom a mere sum of the parts and the interlayer interactions in such materials are not as weak as they may seem at first. The layers often ‘see’ each other, and an interplay of their individual properties gives rise to novel phenomena. Thanks to the recent methodological and technological developments, materials science is now able to explore single van der Waals monolayers and discovers their unique magnetic, superconducting and transport properties originating from quantum effects. It is now also possible to trace how these properties evolve while transiting from 3D to 2D structures. These new possibilities attract many to the vibrant interdisciplinary research field on so called ‘van der Waals quantum materials’. While fully appreciating the prospects that layered materials hold for new chemistry and physics, one should not forget about the other side of the medal: the formation of competing polymorphs, or metastable, or poorly ordered phases with strong stacking disorder challenge the synthesis. I will give a brief overview of the nowadays most prominent van der Waals materials ‘beyond graphene’ (e.g. transition metal dichalcogenides, CrI3 and other magnetic 2D materials, 2D topological insulators and superconductors) and then focus on the family of (MnBi2Te4)(Bi2Te3)n, n = 0-3, layered compounds. They exhibit both magnetic and topological (quantized surface transport) properties that can be tuned by compositional and structural modifications.