The Third Floor, No Lift

A canal house stair is closer to a ladder than to a staircase, and every visitor to this city discovers it with a suitcase in one hand. The treads are narrow, the pitch is severe, the turn at each half-landing is tight enough to require a decision, and in the older houses the handrail is a rope. There are hotels in the ring where reception is at street level and your room is three of these flights above it.

They exist because of tax and because of water. Amsterdam houses were taxed on their frontage, so they were built narrow and deep and tall, and the stair had to fit inside a footprint that had no width to spare. Everything bulky went up the outside on a hook at the gable, which is why the hooks are still there and why the stairs were never required to carry furniture.

What it does to an arrival

Less than you would guess, and it does not move the clock. Twenty to thirty minutes across the centre is a door-to-door figure and three flights are ninety seconds of it. What the stair actually changes is the state of the person at the top, which is why a therapist working a night with two canal-house bookings in it will pace the evening differently from one working towers near the station.

The second effect is acoustic and more interesting. A wooden stair in a house that has been standing for three hundred years announces everything. In an apartment this matters, because the household hears it. In a canal-house hotel it does not, because what the stair announces is a guest coming up to bed, which is the only thing it ever announces after eleven at night.

What the top floor gives back

The rooms at the top of these houses are the smallest in the building and they are also, consistently, the best rooms to work in. Three reasons, and only the first is obvious.

There is nobody above you. In a city of converted houses with timber floors, the neighbour overhead is the loudest thing in most rooms, and an attic has none. Second, the top floor is warm, sometimes too warm, and warmth is the single most useful property a room can have here. Third, nobody passes. A top landing serves one or two doors rather than twenty, so the corridor traffic that exists on every other floor simply does not reach it.

Against that, the beams. Sloped ceilings in the eaves cut the usable space more sharply than the floor plan suggests, and the constraint that matters is whether there is a clear lane on one long side of the bed. Most attic doubles have one. The attic single wedged into the eave on three sides is the one room in this city that genuinely does not work, and it is rarer than the worry about it.

The case where the stair decides

Two therapists. A four-hand session needs two people working opposite sides simultaneously, which requires two lanes, and a top-floor canal room has one. That is not a stair problem but it correlates perfectly with stairs: the buildings with the hardest staircases have the smallest rooms at the top of them. If a booking involves two practitioners, expect a question about the room before anyone is paired.

Everything else works exactly as it does at street level, including the hour. The stair is no steeper at two in the morning than at two in the afternoon, and the late hours carry no surcharge for it or for anything else. The building-by-building character of the centre, canal houses included, is set out in the Centrum hotel guide.