This Charming Hotel Outside Amsterdam Is an Old Master Painting Made New

Step inside, though, and the hotel’s altogether more contemporary design scheme makes it evident De Durgerdam has a few surprises up its sleeve. The long, central room houses a lounge area for arriving guests, a bar topped with sinewy pink marble, and seating that looks something like a velvet-covered church pew—offering an object lesson in how to take the design codes of decades past and make them feel entirely fresh. A 17th-century still life painting is hung on one of the putty-yellow walls, while the furniture includes a mix of weathered wooden farmhouse chairs and sleeker midcentury pieces. Downstairs, in a subterranean snug area, a fireplace crackles in the center of a room painted a muddy red (a nod to the color of the tanned sails of old Dutch ships), while a wall of exposed brickwork reveals the near-invisible seams between the original structure of the building and its meticulously refurbished second skin. 

This bijou property, which features three suites among the individually designed rooms, might seem modest at first, but how it came into existence tells a very different story. De Durgerdam opened just a few weeks ago under the aegis of Paul Geertman, founder of the Amsterdam-based investor and hospitality company Aedes, which specializes in finding and restoring historic buildings in the city for redevelopment as hotels. (Previous projects have included the Amsterdam branches of Soho House, The Hoxton, and Andaz.) After setting his sights on running a hotel all his own, he stumbled across a property in the town of Durgerdam, whose 500 inhabitants are mostly either those who’ve been here for generations, or young families who’ve moved out of the city center in search of a little more outdoor space. 

It would be handy, one imagines, to have observed the challenges of establishing a hotel in a historic building before launching into your first project. But when it came to executing his exacting vision for the interiors, Geertman decided to hand over the reins to the design studio Buro Belén, whose thoughtful updates of the building’s historical features are rooted in a balance between the public spaces, which deliberately foster a sense of relaxed sociability, and the private quarters of the bedrooms, which place the emphasis firmly on seclusion and tranquility. (There are plenty of 21st-century mod cons here too: rainfall showers, TVs hidden away in sliding panels, and even custom sky blue raincoats designed by the cult Amsterdam brand Kassl Editions.)