REVIEWS

SWEETS hotel review / 17 November 2017

SWEETS hotel in The New York Times T magazine

“You don’t need a lobby… The city itself becomes the hotel.”

We know what a hotel looks like: a single building housing a variety of rooms. But what does it look like when these spaces are spread all across town? Something like Amsterdam’s Sweets, which is converting 28 of the city’s canal-side bridge-controller houses into individual hotel rooms. For decades, the elevated one-room structures (all, of course, with ideal views of the canals) sheltered workers who would raise and lower the bridges with the push of a button; however, they became obsolete when the system went digital last year. “They’re little architectural eye candies,” Sweets co-founder Suzanne Oxenaar says of the houses, which include contemporary iterations like one with a facade of glass and mint-green cement and a sturdy red-brick octagon designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage, the father of modern Dutch architecture. “I think most [Dutch people] have wondered what it would be like to live in one of them.”

The challenge, says another of the hotel’s co-founders, the architect Marthijn Pool, “was to turn these extroverted objects into intimate spaces.” Inside, guests will find simple studios appointed with custom furniture — the Kinkerbrug building, for example, which sits above the Kostverlorenvaart in Amsterdam-West, has an all-in-one wooden bed, table and bench that echoes the 1920s-era Amsterdam School style. For Westerdoksbrug, a periscope-like structure near Central Station, the designers made a bed that, when enclosed with a bright pink curtain, becomes a room within a room. Six of the suites open this month, and another eight will be completed by spring, giving visitors the opportunity to wake up in a new neighborhood every morning. “You don’t need a lobby,” Pool says. “The city itself becomes the hotel.”

— Gisela Williams. Illustrations by Konstantin Kakanias

Read the article on the New York Times website

SWEETS hotel review / 20 October 2017

SCHARREBIERSLUIS

“A unique, small, character house in the centre of Amsterdam. A peaceful location from which you can access the busy city centre. No hotel lobby, no night porter, no lift, and no long hotel corridors, just your very own front door and some wonderful solitude. You are not a visitor, you’re a part of the city. Thank you for this unique experience.”

— Kiki & Jogchem Bagijn, Amsterdam