Carmen

Popular shop on first floor with nice living room with wonderful breakfasts and guest rooms on the upper flours of 17th-century family house. Just right in the city center on Keizergracht.

Sweets Hotel bridge houses

Amsterdam’s decommissioned bridge houses turned into tiny one-suite hotels. You get your own little tower over a canal — the most Amsterdam sleep possible. There are 28 iconic bridge houses available for stay, but we recommend that one we experienced – Number 202 on Kortjewantsbrug. This bridge tower has a 360-degree view of Amsterdam’s most iconic buildings from different times, including the Maritime Museum, NEMO Science Museum, and ARCAM. Free entrance to the Maritime Museum is included.

Grand Hotel Amrath

The Scheepvaarthuis, 1916 — the building where the Amsterdam School begins. Johan van der Mey drew it as a joint headquarters for six shipping companies, and let Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer cover every surface: sculpted brick prows, wrought iron, stained glass, sea gods and compass roses, down to the door handles. It is a five-star hotel now, which is the easiest way to get inside a listed monument — you can walk the original stairwell on your way to bed. Ask for a room facing the water.

Botel

A ship moored at the NDSM wharf, and the cheapest way to wake up on the IJ. The rooms are small and plain — this is a budget hotel, not a design statement — but you step off the gangway straight into the old shipyard: the crane, the painted warehouses, the studios, the street art. The ferry to Centraal is free and takes about fifteen minutes. Ask for a room on the water side.

Pension Homeland

The old naval base on Kattenburg, shut off from the city for centuries and only opened up in the last decade. The hotel takes one of the marine buildings — plain rooms, high ceilings, windows onto the green — and keeps a restaurant, a bar and its own brewery downstairs. Ten minutes from Centraal, surrounded by water and trees, and still slightly secret.

Fort Resort Beemster

A concrete fort turned spa. It belongs to the Stelling van Amsterdam — the ring of forts and floodable polders that once defended the city, now UNESCO World Heritage — and it sits in the Beemster, the seventeenth-century drained lake that is World Heritage in its own right as the model for Dutch land reclamation. You soak under bomb-proof vaults, in the middle of a perfect grid of fields. Forty minutes north of the centre, and worth it for the pairing alone.