The best design hotels in Amsterdam
The best design hotels in Amsterdam, featuring the top places to stay for canal views, imaginative interiors and quirky touches.
A privately owned hotel stretching through 25 houses, the Pulitzer (and its superb restaurant) is in a prime canal-belt location, close to the Anne Frank House. It is a delightful warren of passages, stairways, sudden open spaces, with many an original feature intact, but with a refreshingly individual makeover by whizz designer Jacu Strauss. Rooms come in all shapes and sizes, and are imaginatively decorated in a way that picks up on Amsterdam's history and contemporary Dutch design. Strauss’s design gives each an individual, home-from-home feel, with modern art from the hotel’s own collection.
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Housed in an erstwhile telephone exchange building (from the 1920s), as well as in a 1906 former bank across the road, W boasts space, style and edgy design, while bringing a touch of New York pizazz and snap-to-it service to Amsterdam. A lift whisks you from the low-key entrance area to a vast, glass-walled space extending over the entire top of the Exchange building, containing the lobby, lounge, bar and restaurant. One side of the hotel looks directly onto the Royal Palace with a rooftop pool running the length of the cornice outside.
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Dutch designer Marcel Wanders has taken the adventures of Lewis Carroll’s Alice as the inspiration for the hotel’s fun and theatrical interiors. Imaginative touches include chandeliers suspended from over-sized bells in reception, high-backed chairs reminiscent of tulip heads and an entrance-way lined with miniature doors. Nods to this being a hotel in Holland include notes of Delft blue in the carpets and wallpaper, cute clogs on the walls, accents of orange and a cheeky red light area. The bright and light standard rooms are a good size and have either canal (preferable) or garden views.
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Italian interiors architect Piero Lissoni is the star here. He has transformed the weighty 19th-century building (once a bank, and for many years the Sweelinck music conservatory) into an uplifting expanse of contemporary design. Wall-tiles, stained glass and many other features of the original structure remain intact, beautifully restored, but it is Lissoni’s trademark clean lines, muted fabrics and cheeky flashes of colour that set the tone. The spacious, glass-enclosed lobby-lounge surpasses any in town for drink, meal (it includes a brasserie), or coffee stop-off. There’s also an excellent spa, and an 18-metre pool.
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Built in the 1920s as a hostel for migrants, later used as a prison, Lloyd Hotel now presents a Who’s Who of Dutch design, from 20th-century greats like Gerrit Rietveld to paint-still-wet contemporaries. Corridors and stairwells have an institutional air, with chipped stone floors, high ceilings and tiled walls, then comes an overlay of colourful, zany, cheeky and chic work by over 50 different Dutch designers. Each room is a different designer’s fantasy. Many are very large by Amsterdam standards, and most bathrooms are very open-plan.
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Dutch design studio Concrete picked up on the building’s newspaper history, but with a light touch (here and there an old typewriter, or wall of print-plates), at times conceptual (brass fittings in the rooms, intended to retain countless guests’ fingerprints and so ‘tell a story’). Press-related knick-knacks abound in the rooms, and walls are decorated with artist Jan Rothuizen’s witty, informative ‘Soft Map of Amsterdam’, with anecdotes and observations of his marbles through the city. The Pressroom has more of the atmosphere of a hip city eaterie than a hotel restaurant.
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Current Dutch design is renowned for its quirkiness, and it’s here to see: a chandelier in the lobby hangs to waist height, the open hearth is suspended from its own chimney. But there are classic touches, too: scuffed leather chairs, enveloping sofas. Colours are dark and strong, with an abundance of mustard-yellow wallpaper. The hotel attracts Dutch media celebs, seasoned world travellers, and digi-business visitors, who sit with their tablets, in earnest conversations over breakfast. Most rooms have oodles of space (for Amsterdam).
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Having honed the formula in London's Shoreditch and Holborn, The Hoxton brings stylish interiors, buzzing public spaces and slick service to a row of five historic canalside townhouses on Herengracht. Handily, there is a fleet of bikes for guest use, and it's near the Van Gogh Museum. Battered leather sofas, vintage lighting and Fifties Danish furniture populate a lobby made for lounging. Designed by local interiors duo Nicemakers, the 111 rooms deliver masculine dark wood herringbone floors, a Fifties-styled Danish desk and chair, and wood-panelled walls with a flourish of Vermeer blue.
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You enter through a 17th-century arch and gateway, and across a courtyard, which helps give The Dylan its discreet, exclusive atmosphere. Inside, old-world elegance sets the base note (wood-panelled walls, leather upholstery), with exuberant contemporary flourishes (geometric light fittings atop a long, black marble bar). Rooms are spread through two adjacent buildings, and vary considerably in shape and style: some large, with canal views; others cosy, off a central courtyard; some spilt over two levels; others up under the roof beams.
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An Eighties building, incorporating two 17th-century houses, in a busy spot just across the way from Centraal Station. The décor is calm and contemporary, and service is brightly efficient, with thoughtful attention to detail. The restaurant serves hearty, imaginative Holland-meets-America cuisine. nside, Ave Bradley’s soothing design – soft blues and greys, minimalist clarity offset by eye-catching contemporary artworks and intriguing furniture – creates a pool of calm. A large lobby lounge divides effortlessly into separate seating areas, each with a different mood. Here and there a period touch (old beams, a flash of stained glass) from one of the older buildings remains, and local references (Delftware colouring, work by Dutch artists) abound.
