Destination · Amsterdam
Amsterdam
The easiest of these places to reach, and the easiest to get wrong. Almost everyone sees the same four square kilometres and leaves thinking that was the city.
Three days here can be spent entirely inside the postcard: the canal ring, the queue outside the Anne Frank House, a boat with a glass roof and a recorded commentary. It’s a pleasant enough version of Amsterdam and it isn’t the one worth flying for. What follows is the city we go back to — residential canals, a market before it fills, and four hundred years of merchant history sitting in plain sight on every gable. Three ways in. None of them complete.
01 — The Selection
Three ways to read the same city.
Itinerary
Amsterdam, Away From the Water You Know
Jordaan on the Friday, Noordermarkt before nine, De Pijp for dinner and the free ferry north. What we actually do when we’re back.
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Culture & Design
What Amsterdam Hides Behind Its Front Windows
Curtains stay open, houses were taxed by their width, and Dutch design was never Scandinavian whatever the algorithm says.
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Sensory
Amsterdam at the Hour the Water Goes Still
The ten minutes most evenings when the canals stop moving, and what the city sounds like once they do.
Read the piece →02 — Recommended Stay
Boutique hotel
The Dylan Amsterdam
The site has been in use since the Keizersgracht was dug in 1613, first as the Duytsche Academie — the city’s first theatre. It burned in 1772 and was rebuilt. The bakery added in 1787 now holds Vinkeles, the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant, with the original ovens left where the restoration found them. It has only been a hotel since 1999. The courtyard is the reason to stay rather than the canal frontage — you can’t see it from the street, which is rather the point.
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