Lloyd Hotel & Cultural Embassy by Jeroen Bergmans

The Lloyd Hotel was built in 1921 as a hostel for Eastern European immigrants en route to a new life in South America, but has been transformed into one of the most quirky and culturally rich of Amsterdam's boutique hotels by four of the city’s foremost creative minds.

Located in the up-and-coming Eastern Docklands, three stops from Central Station on tram number 26, the Lloyd Hotel is a cutting-edge alternative to the Golden Age grandeur usually associated with Amsterdam.

The facilities

Architects MVRDV carved huge sections from the roof of the main hall (which now houses restaurant Snel), flooding the interiors of the boutique hotel with light and adding mezzanines and spaces for exhibitions, meetings, concerts and creative brainstorming.

In fact, the whole focus of the Lloyd Hotel is creativity. Furniture by Holland’s top designers including Ineke Hans, Hella Jongerius and Richard Hutten grace the rooms and line the corridors where they are left for guests to borrow. The boutique hotel’s library was donated by world-famous art school the Rietveld Academie, and the in-house Cultural Embassy can procure tickets to concerts, plays and performances in town.

The rooms

Driven by a desire to offer guests accommodation to suit all budgets, the Lloyd’s creative committee came up with a novel idea that totally contravenes the conventions of a normal boutique hotel or luxury hotel. The 117 rooms range from one to five stars with room rates to match. At the bottom end of the scale there are shared bathrooms and simple rooms. Fold-away, modular, fibreglass bathrooms in primary colours are the hallmarks of those designated 2 and 3 stars. And the top two categories have cavernous spaces with extravagant features including grand pianos, museum-standard furniture and four-metre beds that sleep eight.