Words: Gentleman's Journal
We’ve all stayed in hotels where a month or so down the road we not entirely sure what the place looked like. It’s not just details that understandably escape us – the bathroom’s colour scheme, the style of the reception area, the floor surfaces – sometimes the whole damn building slips its mooring and drifts away from our memory bank. We must have stayed there, there’s a credit card listing to prove it, but the place has descended to the bottom of the bottom league; it was just a place where we slept.
Amsterdam has its share of unmemorable hostelries, but there are also some fabulous buildings that designers have worked on and transformed into hotels, the bedrooms of which you are unlikely to forget having rested your head on before slipping into an easy sleep.
INTERCONTINENTAL AMSTEL HOTEL
A palatial building, dominating a corner site by the side of the Amstel river, was constructed as a splendidly dignified hotel in 1867 and more than a century and a quarter later has lost little of its grandeur. With fewer than 80 rooms, the Amstel can accommodate generously-sized sleeping quarters and the chandeliered lobby is impressively majestic in scale. Rooms are decorated in a classic but demure French style, while the views out to the river or city square are unmistakeably Dutch.
Being on the same level as the river outside, the indoor swimming pool is cool – as is the cardio and weight training equipment and the Turkish bath in the health and fitness club that is open to guests. In short: the Intercontinental Amstel offers stateliness of design, easygoing luxury and a terrific location.
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THE CONSERVATORIUM
Another building of distinction, a Neo-Gothic, fin de siècle edifice built to house a bank, was transformed in late 2011 by a Milanese designer into a contender for the city’s most glamorous hotel. The visual impact of its formal exterior, best appreciated from across the road, cannot prepare you for the entrance up steps into an antechamber where an intricate collection of violins (in the 1980s the building was a music conservatory) hang low from the ceiling and play host to a floral display of tulips from Amsterdam. It’s a dramatic and witty design statement but far bolder is the industrial-chic, glass-boxed and thus light-filled atrium which functions as lobby, lounge and, separated by a line of trees, a smart brasserie. It’s a mammoth and high space, a mini metropolis where guests rub shoulders with smart-casual gents and female fashionistas.
Some 130 bedrooms occupy 8 floors and the long stately corridors retain splendid original tiling – note the motifs of spiders, bees and pigs that hark back to the hotel’s bank origins – while the high ceilings allow almost half the bedrooms to be duplexes with two bathrooms. Personally, I warm to the bedsit feel of large hotel bedrooms and stairs within the room proved irksome; best think about this and state a preference when booking. Either way, you’ll love the rainfall showers, bathroom TV and gorgeously soft micro-cotton towels. The gym and spa is huge (1000m2), with a hammam experience and the high-end shopping gallery includes a snazzy hair salon and a humidor retailing Cuban cigars.
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WALDORF ASTORIA
Not thinking about Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue in New York is a prerequisite for imaging the design of the eponymous Amsterdam hotel. We are talking about a small city of 800,000 people (with the same number of bicycles) and, dating back to the 16th-18th century, nearly 9,000 buildings. The Waldorf Astoria is housed in six of these, an adjacent set of canal houses that are part of the UNESCO World Heritage list, and the hotel opened May 2014. Floor-to-ceiling windows flood the interior with light, a patrician 18th-century staircase distinguishes the august lobby area and stucco gleams ultra white from every corner and ceiling.
Check-in desks are discreetly placed in two period rooms near the entrance, preparing the way for a super-sophisticated experience: Nespresso machines in the bedrooms and very stylish bathrooms, a Michelin two-star restaurant, Guerlain spa and pool, bespoke cocktails in the bar. This is an expensive luxe hotel – the real deal when it comes to a hotel with heritage – and while it is a tad formal and lacks urban buzz, it is very appealing in its own way. The garden to the rear, ebulliently alive with tulips of every hue, adds a resplendent dash of colour.
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ANDAZ HOTEL
Dutch award-winning designer Marcel Wanders eschews the stately and regal in favour of the informal and democratic, and this is immediately noticeable upon stepping through the doors of this supremely style-conscious hotel. Any obvious check-in desk is missing, just a couple of casually dressed young guys and girls with tablet computers who handle the formalities at circular tables, in the bar or seated in high-backed, tulip-shaped chairs. The brightly coloured chairs are just one of the witty nods to being in Holland’s capital; another is the ‘red light’ décor leading the way to the spa.
This lobby area is the ground level of a cleverly designed space, the Observatorium, that will have you gazing up in wonder at the lighting system and its appurtenances, looking down to decipher the carpet’s globe-trotting theme or just distracted by the video art on display. Only with the elevator ride up the bedrooms do you see the details of the highly graphic wallpaper lining one wall of the Observatorium – so by the time you reach your room you’re drunk with design concepts and reeling from the visual theatricals. The show continues inside the techy bedrooms (choose canal or garden view) with hand-painted washbasins, designer furniture and an eye-catching fish theme on the wall behind the king-sized bed. Creature comforts are not forgotten, with toilets and shower separated and a two-way mirror on the glass partition separating them from the room. Back downstairs there is a modish restaurant and a bar with a communal table for easy socialising. Make no mistake, this is a hip hotel on a design mission.
For more, click here.
By Sean Sheehan
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