Grand Hotel Amrâth Amsterdam

Grand Hotel Amrâth Amsterdam review Rate it

The 15th hotel in the Amrâth chain owned by Giovanni van Eijl has been a long time coming, but then if you're going to convert one of the landmark buildings of Dutch architecture into five-star accommodation, it's never going to be a rush job.

The Grand Hotel Amrâth Amsterdam occupies the fabulous structure on Prins Hendrikkade known locally as the Scheepvaarthuis or 'Maritime House'. It was on this building that many of the greatest names in Dutch modernism cut their teeth, and from which the signature flowing lines of the architectural style gained a named: the Amsterdam School.

On the very spot where Cornelis Houtman and Peter de Keyser set off for the East Indies on 10 March 1595 (opening the chapter on Dutch maritime dominance), construction work began, in 1913, on grand headquarters for a number of major shipping lines, designed by Johan van der Mey - a complete unknown who would, in fact, turn out to be a bit of a one-hit wonder. The same can't be said for those who worked with him: Piet Kramer would later design more than 400 of the city's bridges and Michel de Klerk would come up with Het Schip in Westerpark. The extraordinary carvings on the façade of nautical motifs and Dutch explorers were the second commission for Hildo Krop, soon to make his mark as official city sculptor.

Completed in 1916, the building is a mad confection of brick, granite, marble, porphyry and slate, with mahogany, ebony and even coromandel wood within. For nearly 70 years, the shipping lines were based here: the last of the old tenants, the KNSM, finally set sail from the building in 1981, whereupon the council purchased it for around ƒ14 million (roughly €6.4 million), and public transport and parking companies moved in.

In the mid-1990s, Amrâth stepped in, but delays with the GVB moving out meant that conversion of the monument has taken ten years to complete; add to that the difficulty of working with many listed features that had to be preserved intact, and the enormous scale of the work becomes clear.

Due to have finally opened by mid-2007, the hotel consists of 137 rooms and 26 suites, the most prestigious being a three-storey-high one in the front tower. There's a swimming pool (an addition to the select band of Amsterdam hotels offering such a facility), and although it offers the usual roster of deluxe hotel frills and fripperies (plus the welcome addition of free mini-bars), style-wise, its unique feeling of timelessness remains defiantly anti-boutique.