Amsterdam’s Pillows Hotel Maurits At The Park Sparkles On The City’s East Side

05.04.2024 - 13:25 / forbes.com

Even as Dutch entrepreneur Alex Mulder found success as part of a diversified investment firm, he always kept the idea of giving back. And so, when he and his colleagues at the parent company of the hospitality upstart Pillows Hotels saw that a historic property in his childhood neighborhood on the east side of Amsterdam was for sale—one with a hotel permit already attached to it—he went for the opportunity.

Pillows Grand Boutique Hotel Maurits at the Park Amsterdam opened in late 2022—the group’s fifth anniversary—as the first five-star hotel in the brand’s small portfolio of hotels in the Netherlands and Belgium. While the luxury level went up a notch, the brand hallmarks stayed in place: historic building, residential design, art collection and emphasis on snazzy gastronomy.

In this case, the hotel occupies a 1908 redbrick building that was a medical university, and even after the meticulous six-year restoration, some hallways still give guests a feeling of returning to school. This is not unpleasant. The campus is at the edge of Oosterpark, and the developers decided to open the grounds to residents. Fences came down, and Amsterdammers gained one acre of parkland.

“We are adding the hotel to the park; usually, it is the other way around,” says Uri Gilad of the award-winning architectural firm Office Winhov, which oversaw the transformation. During my stay, a hotel employee made the same point, showing me the fences built around neighboring buildings.

This also benefits guests, of course. The architects used a variety of window types in the new wing to connect the indoors with the outdoors, giving the rooms a feeling of spaciousness and life. The developers installed nesting boxes, feeding areas and a protective aviary to attract birds and animate the scenery.

While the garden may be open to the public, there’s plenty of private space indoors for guests. In the center of the hotel is a quiet, art-book-filled lounge area that they call the Living. It’s accessed only by card-key—other parts of the hotel, which could have been called the Eating and the Drinking, are open to outsiders—and where check-in and concierge conversations take place.

As in the rest of the hotel, the design here has what designer Paul Linse calls a “noble simplicity.” His interior design firm, Studio Linse, returned to Pillows Hotels after winning an award for its work at the brand’s property in the Dutch city of Zwolle. In Amsterdam, that noble simplicity takes the form of soft, tactile materials and a warm color palette that are a foil for the school-hall austerity of the corridors.

Each of the 88 rooms has a painting by Raphaël Hermans, and the work of other contemporary Dutch artists appears throughout. It’s mixed with