Boutique hotels and the small lobby

A large share of central Amsterdam's rooms sit in small hotels rather than chains: a handful of joined canal houses, twenty or thirty rooms, a reception that doubles as a bar, and a staircase built for a seventeenth-century merchant rather than a modern guest. The house sends therapists to these buildings every night and never names any of them, but the type has features worth knowing.

A small lobby sees more

In a hotel of four hundred rooms, a person crossing to the lifts is one of many. In a hotel of twenty-four, the night porter may know every guest by sight. That does not make a visit harder; it makes the manner of it matter more. A therapist enters as someone who belongs there, and where a porter is likely to be at the door, the guest meeting her downstairs removes any question before it forms. A line in the thread about the size of the building helps the office plan it. The front desk entry covers the general principle.

Stairs, not lifts

Many canal-house hotels have no lift, or a lift that ends a floor or two below the upper rooms. The stairs are narrow and close to vertical. They add a minute or two to the final stretch and nothing to the forty to sixty minutes quoted, but a guest in the highest room is kind to mention it. The journal note the third floor, no lift describes the climb.

Rooms built narrow

Old houses were built deep rather than wide, and their rooms follow. A small double with a bed against one wall leaves little space to move around it, and shifting an armchair or a bedside table to open a walking lane is often worthwhile. Everything returns to its place before the therapist leaves. The practical side is in small rooms and the space around the bed.

A boutique room costs the same on the ladder as any other. Character in the building adds nothing to the fee.