Steep Stairs and Second Doors in Amsterdam Apartments

Longer trips, the kind taken in retirement or to mark a round birthday, often mean a rented apartment rather than a hotel. In Amsterdam that usually means a canal house or a tall brick building in De Pijp or Oud-West, and those buildings were not designed with visitors in mind. They were designed to be narrow, because frontage was taxed, and to be tall, because land was scarce. The consequences arrive at the front door.

The door that is not your door

Many older buildings have two doors before you reach anything that belongs to you. The street door opens onto a narrow hallway or a tiled passage, sometimes shared with a shop or a ground-floor flat. Somewhere inside is a second door, often unmarked, which opens onto the stairs to the upper floors. The bells outside may carry surnames of people who left years ago, or numbers that bear no obvious relation to the floors.

None of this is a problem once it is written down. She comes to the apartment itself, not to the street, so the thread needs to say which bell to ring, whether the street door is left on the latch, and which of the inner doors leads upwards. A line like this does it: the second bell down, street door then the green door on the left, third floor, the door facing the stairs.

The stairs themselves

Amsterdam stairs are famous for being steep, narrow and in some houses closer to a ladder than a staircase. Guests who have been climbing them for a few days know this already. It is worth mentioning in the thread how many floors there are, so she can plan for them, and whether there is a lift at the back of the building that is easy to miss. Some newer conversions have one; many older houses never will.

She carries a bag with towels and oil, and a clear route up helps. If there are bicycles in the hallway, and in this city there usually are, nothing needs moving, but a mention of where the light switch is saves a minute of searching in the dark.

Give the directions early

The one thing to avoid is writing the directions in the last half hour, when she may already be on her way and reading a message is harder. Put them in the thread when you confirm, or the day before for a booking made ahead. She works from what is written in the thread, so the more exact the note, the smoother the knock.

If you are still arriving at the apartment yourself on the day, it is fine to add the details once you have seen the building; many guests only discover the second door when they find the key box.

Warmth in a tall old house

Canal houses are cold in a particular way. The tall front windows let the chill in, the floors are often bare boards, and the heating tends to be a single radiator working hard under a window that was never quite sealed. Turn it up well ahead, an hour at least, and draw the curtains when it gets dark. If there is a smaller bedroom at the back of the apartment away from the street, it is often warmer than the grand front room and makes a better choice for the evening.

The bed and the space around it

Apartment beds vary as much as hotel beds do. A bed pushed into an alcove or against a wall on two sides is workable, but it helps her to know. For two therapists at once, or a couple with a therapist each, the room needs space on both sides of the bed, which some compact canal-house bedrooms simply do not have; say what the room is like, and the reply will tell you whether the arrangement fits.

The arrival window does not change

Forty to sixty minutes from confirmation to her knock holds anywhere in central Amsterdam, including a fourth-floor walk-up in the Jordaan. Stairs do not add a charge, and neither does the distance inside the ring. The page for retirement trips covers apartments and longer stays in more detail, and the booking page lists the order the messages run in.