The best hotels in Amsterdam
All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Amsterdam, with its spider’s web of canals, charming quarters and quirky corners, is the place to eschew purpose-built hotels and go for buildings with a past: converted canalside mansions, old schools, former almshouses and more. When it comes to our pick of the best hotels in Amsterdam, expect rooms of all shapes and sizes, interiors from the hip to the headily luxurious, and all manner of decor, from starkly minimalist to antique-store clutter and the summits of contemporary design. Their restaurants are often among the most adventurous in town, and the bars are way out front on the best bars in Amsterdam scene.
Which part of Amsterdam is best to stay?
For the quintessential Amsterdam experience, a hotel in the historic central Canal District, happening De Pijp, museum-filled Zuid or über-charming Jordaan is a must, but there are also great places to be found in quarters west and east of the centre and across the water behind Amsterdam Centraal Station.
What are the best cheap hotels in Amsterdam?
Some of our favourite affordable places to stay in Amsterdam include Conscious Hotel Westerpark, where rooms start from £90 per night, and the rock-n'-roll-themed hotel Sir Adam Hotel, which is a short ferry ride away from Central Station. See our edit of the best affordable hotels in Amsterdam for more.
hotelThe July, Boat & Co.
In Houthaven, a newer neighbourhood set alongside the water (and Amsterdam’s first climate-neutral city district), there’s an impressive mix of old-meets-new architecture, and Boat & Co. dominates the waterline with its impressive former warehouse exterior. Inside, there's a large open-ceilinged lobby which opens onto the hotel's open plan bar and restaurant (where you'll find an excellent cocktail menu, and a steak tartare dish that shouldn't be missed). Rooms certainly don’t feel like the blank canvas you find in some hotels; decor is colourful, with a warm palette of ochre, teal and salmon. Furniture is vintage and upholstered, and the statement headboards are wrapped in Christopher Farr fabric to add a chic finishing touch. When we stayed, the highlight was the huge bathroom – a rare thing to find – which had a walk-in shower, and toiletries from local brand Marie-Stella-Maris that smelt so good I ended up popping into the shop and buying some to take home. A highlight of the stay was the ability to lend bicycles from the hotel, which meant getting into the centre of Amsterdam was simple. If you love feeling like a local when you travel, this is the place for you. Abigail Malbon
hotelHotel de L'Europe
Featured in our Gold List of the best hotels in the world 2024
In a city more known for its scene-y or slick design hotels, De L’Europe resides like a distinguished matriarch on the banks of the Amstel, overlooking the rippling waves – and tourist barges – of the river and higgledy-piggledy mustard-hued merchants’ houses. Once a 17th-century Renaissance-style inn on the site of former defence walls, the hotel has gradually gone upmarket under the ownership of the Heineken family since 1950. A Dutch-focused art collection peers from the walls and a lobby draped in floor-to-ceiling bronze silks and tarragon velvets envelops guests with mirror-walled nooks that become gossipy corners at night, soft-lit by antique crystal chandeliers and fuelled by cocktails that mix cumin seeds with coriander-infused mezcal. Rooms are bathed in light and provide a televisual view of the moving city. Warm-floored marble bathrooms come stocked with Diptyque products, and super-king-sized beds are framed by geometric headboards. As a result of the hotel acquiring the buildings next door over the years, the show-stopper rooms are now the new ‘t Huys suites, overseen by creatives from the art and design world, such as Salle Privée and jeweller Bibi van der Velden, with more in the pipeline. One of the hotel’s biggest draws is Marie, the Côte d’Azur-inspired bistro, with perfect steak tartare and tarte tatin. For a blowout, the two-Michelin-starred Flore’s “conscious fine dining” offers such treats as North Sea crab with sour quince gel, chanterelle mushroom and walnut leaf. Jemima Sissons
Ralph Reniers 2023hotelThe Hoxton Lloyd Amsterdam
The Hoxton group’s first Amsterdam hotel opened in 2015 across four townhouses on a city-centre canal; this 2023 sequel is a world apart, occupying a 1920s shipping-line HQ in the revived Eastern Docklands, a district that’s been gathering pace since the millennium. But the two share a similar interior-design palette, with two-tone painted walls, angular mid-century ceramics and furniture, and a flurry of geometric fabrics and rugs. The art on the walls is curated by local gallery Bisou, and includes a huge, Fifties-style tile mural above the raw seafood bar in the conservatory-style restaurant, an all-day hub for comfort food such as picahana steak, potato latkes and mussels in vermouth cream. The standalone Barbue bar, set in the original wood-lined booking hall, is one of the Hoxton’s finest – riffing on Argentinian serves such as the Cha Cha (gin, apricot brandy, fizz). Upstairs, waterfront rooms are the best, with several family options including bunk beds; for special occasions, book the Tower Room, with its spiral staircase leading up to a crow’s nest viewpoint. It's a hotel for a fresh perspective on the city, in an untouristy neighbourhood that’s just a short tram or cycle ride from the centre. Rick Jordan
hotelPillows Maurits at the Park
Maurits at the Park is a sophisticated boutique hotel next to the leafy Oosterpark, a lesser-known, yet just as enticing, Amsterdam neighbourhood. Housed in a historic university building the Pillows’ team put a momentous effort into preserving every historical detail of, there are stained glass windows and colourful glazed bricks. Rooms are peppered across the old building and meander into the new as the architecture effortlessly transitions. The decor is inviting yet elegant, and the stone-coloured tones and textures create a serene environment, while the floor-to-ceiling windows seamlessly connect the hotel and the park.
The hotel has two restaurants - the Spring Brasserie and Van Oost, their fine dining experience. The more casual Spring Brasserie offers fresh and delicious meals from breakfast to supper, while Van Oost, the brainchild of chef Floris van Straalen, celebrates worldly flavours via Dutch ingredients. And let us not forget Fitz’s bar, a plush, speakeasy-inspired bar perfect for enjoying a cocktail (or two!).
Roel RuijsThe Dylan
This place is intimate, exclusive and quietly detached from the city’s hurly-burly, yet in the heart of the historic hotel district, with club-like armchairs and a fireplace in the lounge, and a sleeker dark-marble bar. Rooms – some large with canal views, others cosier under attic beams or facing onto a courtyard – are interspersed throughout two august canalside buildings and individually decorated: lush red and copper, perhaps, or cooler white, grey and peppermint green. In Vinkeles restaurant (well-spaced tables in a brick-lined 18th-century bakery), chef Dennis Kuipers serves Michelin-starred new Dutch cuisine, with affordable options from the same kitchen in the bar/brasserie alongside. Read the full review of The Dylan
Sander BaksPulitzer Amsterdam
Rooms of all shapes and sizes range up and down the stairs and along the passageways of 25 houses stretching between two canals. Designer Jacu Strauss makes delightful use of period features yet gives the hotel a smart-contemporary feel. There’s plenty of cheekiness, too: an archway built of books with a bicycle on top; a Delft porcelain rooster or some other souvenir-shop weirdness placed in a lamp; a wall of 18 brass trumpets (well, one is purple – a delivery error that somehow works). Jansz. restaurant serves assertive dishes – strong on flavour, with subtle twists. Read our full review of the Pulitzer Amsterdam.
The Hoxton Amsterdam
A magisterial canalside façade masks a welcoming, cosily stylish hotel: soft sofas, scuffed leather armchairs, mounds of cushions and colourful scatter rugs fill a lobby lounge bar that is constantly teeming with locals as well as visitors. Vintage furniture rubs against modern design; dotted about are decorative biscuit tins, old prints and bric-à-brac sufficient to fill a hundred grannies’ attics. Rooms come in all shapes and sizes, with the same trendy but homely air, and the big, jolly Lotti’s restaurant (with retractable glass roof) serves plates of flavourful food – juicy burgers, veal with polenta – all day.
Soho HouseSoho House, Amsterdam
Housed in the Bungehuis building in the centre of the city, this canal-side Soho House has a rooftop pool with views overlooking the city. A Cecconi's and a Cowshed spa are landing this September. And in a nod to the cycling city, there will be a bicycle repair shop in the basement too. Read our full review of Soho House Amsterdam.
Conservatorium
Perfectly positioned between Amsterdam’s Big Three museums and the city’s chicest shopping street, the Conservatorium (once a music conservatory) combines original fin-de-siècle splendour (decorative tiles and brickwork) and witty references to its past life (a chandelier made of violins) with sleek, clean-lined contemporary design by Italian interior architect Piero Lissoni. Many of the rooms are duplexes under original high ceilings, mostly tightly minimalistic but comfortable and warmed by colourful touches. A vast, bright atrium lounge includes an excellent brasserie, while the smart Taiko restaurant upstairs offers superb Japanese-influenced cuisine. The Akasha spa ranks among the best in town, in or out of a hotel.
Tycho MüllerHotel Arena
A former orphanage beside a park, this is now a haven of white minimalism, enlivened by the odd piece of Sixties retro furniture and original 19th-century period design. It’s just east of the city centre, but most sights are a mere 15 minutes away by tram. Rooms are comfortable and in the same white idiom, often with jet-black bathrooms; some are duplexes with high ceilings and large windows. A few look out over the park, as does a glass-walled café and restaurant with a large terrace that leans deliciously towards vegetarian.
Sofitel Legend The Grand Amsterdam
A 17th-century Admiralty building, a 1930s former city hall and an historic canal house or two combine to form a quietly elegant, reposeful retreat, albeit on the edge of the red-light district. The lounge, done up in warm colours with pools of comfy chairs, has a domestic drawing-room atmosphere. Bridges restaurant is up there with the best in town with an inspired menu of curious combinations that really work, and a verdant courtyard garden. Rooms are quietly luxurious, and there is a spa with a good-size pool.
Mark GroeneveldVolkshotel
The old offices of De Volkskrant newspaper, turned into an affordable hotel with a club, bar and restaurant, buzz with life again, engaging young staff and even artists-in-residence in studios out the back. The mood is one of a communal workspace that flips over into fun, with surprises along the way, such as a rooftop outdoor hot tub overlooking the city. Rooms are cleverly designed to seem more spacious than they are (those on the north-west corner of the upper floors have fabulous views). A good-value option that offers more than its peers for the price.
Stefano PinciHotel V Nesplein
A Dutch design makeover has given funky new life to a former office building in a narrow city-centre lane. Inside, old variety posters reference the street’s theatre-district heritage, and a mix of retro furniture (butterfly chairs, Sixties sofas) jostles among mustard-coloured walls, parquet floors and designer cheekiness, such as an open hearth suspended from its own chimney. Rooms vary in shape and design, but most have good-sized bathrooms. Other pluses are the central location and highly popular restaurant and bar, crowded with creative types and spilling out onto a large terrace in good weather.
Grand Hotel Amrâth
The five-storey, turreted Grand Hotel Amrâth occupies the former joint headquarters of a number of Dutch shipping companies and is the first example of the Amsterdam School architecture style, a zany Dutch take on Art Nouveau. It bristles with original features: stone-carved marine creatures, ornate ironmongery, a marble staircase topped by a high stained-glass ceiling. The rooms come with fabrics in carefully researched period designs and are spacious, with large bathrooms. There’s a good spa with a pool (equipped with a jet stream), an Amsterdam School-style café and a reasonably priced restaurant.
Mirjam BleekerSweets Hotel
Bridge houses once used by operators to open and close drawbridges all over town (it’s now done electronically) have been converted with finesse and an exhilaratingly imaginative use of space into standalone hotel suites. Most of them are dinky, except for one or two that are relatively grand, and date from 1673 to 2009. Interiors in each pick up on the period – a touch of 18th-century opulence, perhaps, or Art Deco curves and angles – and mix in prime contemporary Dutch design. Views, by definition, are of the canals, and lodging in the suites provides an entrée into neighbourhoods you might not otherwise reach.
Getty ImagesThe College Hotel
The College is 10 minutes’ walk from the Concertgebouw and Big Three museums in one direction, and the cafés and restaurants of De Pijp in the other, and its name refers to both its 19th-century incarnation as a school and its current function as training hotel for hospitality-industry students. This means the occasional learner’s blip in service, but also that room rates are good value. Sometimes-gloomy school rooms and corridors are enlivened by large arrangements of flowers, contemporary Dutch art and soothing colours. Rooms are comfortable, and the restaurant serves tasty standards by learner-chefs.
Okura
In hip foodie quarter De Pijp, not far from the main museums, the 23-floor Okura towers over low-rise central Amsterdam. Many rooms, as well as the chic Twenty Third Bar and Ciel Bleu restaurant on the top floor have formidable views. Inside, soft colours, beautiful woods and filtered light create an air of tranquillity. Staff match it with effortless politeness, and rooms and bathrooms are eminently luxurious. The restaurants share three Michelin stars between them: Ciel Bleu (adventurous new Dutch cuisine) has two and Yamazato (classical Japanese kaiseki) has one, and Serre brasserie a Bib Gourmand. There’s also a top-class gym and spa with a 60ft pool.
Seven One Seven
Seven One Seven is a grand mansion in the heart of the Canal District, within easy walking distance of the main museums. Grand it may be, but inside it’s relaxed and domestic – rather like visiting the home of some very fortunate friends who happen to have a passion for antiques and curiosities. Expect honeymoon couples galore. There are nine sumptuously decorated suites named after artists, writers and composers, plus the more prosaically titled Room at the Top. There’s no bar or restaurant: you simply ring and order drinks or high tea in the library or drawing room from the charming staff.
Additional reporting by Rodney Bolt