Stylish Amsterdam Pocket Guidebook
The Wallpaper City Guide Puts the Best of Amsterdam into your Pocket
Mar 29, 2007
To write a guidebook to Amsterdam and not mention the Anne Frank House, Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum would be impossible. But every Amsterdam guidebook covers these top city attractions. How do you do it differently? Well, Wallpaper City Guides do it by focussing on all that's chic and stylish in the city.
The Anne Frank House, for example, is seen as one of Amsterdam's landmarks and photographed from across the canal at night. The brief text talks about the old building and its more modern extension in architectural terms, and hardly mentions who lived there or why the house is famous. It expects you to know already, or to find out from other sources. But the atmospheric night-time photo makes you want to go there, and captures the feel of Amsterdam.
Amsterdam has always had style, in the cutting-edge sense rather than the classical sense. Rotterdam too has some stunning modern architecture, like you'll see in no other European city. Amsterdam has no shortage of design-conscious hotels, and the Wallpaper City Guide highlights its choice including the inevitable Dylan but also the typical Amsterdam 't Hotel with its wooden staircases and no lift. Style doesn't always mean an expensive boutique hotel, and the Wallpaper City Guides acknowledge that.
Amsterdam is also a great shopping city, as it hasn't yet been totally taken over by the chain shops that are making cities all around the world look the same. In Amsterdam you can find quirky shops devoted to tea, or cheese, or water, or condoms. They're part of the very individual Dutch character, which manages to be both conservative and radical at the same time. The Wallpaper City Guide Shopping section picks out a chemist, a futuristic shop and a seller of retro furniture, amongst others.
Amsterdam is one of the most fascinating cities in the world. It's unique, like Venice, in ways that perhaps not even London, Paris and New York can claim. There's a distinctive vibe to Amsterdam, and it's an ideal 'Wallpaper' destination. The guide will take you to parts of the city that other more conventional guides overlook, because they're not 'on the tourist trail'. But isn't that the case with any city we know ourselves – we take visitors to the places where the tourists don't go? And the Wallpaper City Guide to Amsterdam does that – as well as the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum and Anne Frank House. And that's where we came in.
The Wallpaper City Guide to Amsterdam is published by Phaidon at £4.95 in the UK and $8.95 in the USA.
Visit the Wallpaper website.
To read my piece about a few of the best and the cheapest Amsterdam hotels, click here.
