Pulitzer Amsterdam

Set behind gabled brick façades on the Prinsengracht, twenty-five canal houses have been joined into a single hotel without losing their separate identities. Exposed beams survive in some rooms, plaster ceiling details remain on the Keizersgracht side, and a carved fireplace still anchors the Saxenburg Room. The redesign, led by Jacu Strauss, drew on four centuries of occupants real and imagined, and the result reads less like a renovation than a layered biography of each building. It is a hotel built from difference, not uniformity. There are 223 rooms and suites in all, no two quite alike, with headboards shaped to echo the city's stepped gables and bathrooms finished in marble. Five Collector's Suites push the concept furthest, each keyed to a fictional obsessive: a book hoarder, an antiques dealer, a devotee of Delftware. At the centre of the property, a garden designed by Copijn, the firm behind the grounds of the Rijksmuseum, opens into an unexpectedly wide courtyard of seasonal planting and sculpture. Guests can take breakfast or a drink there, or step onto one of the hotel's two private boats for a canal cruise. A 24-hour gym sits below the garden, and bicycles, complete with repair kits in every room, are available for the ride out to Amsterdamse Bos. Check-in runs from 3pm.