Rooms and doors of Amsterdam-Noord
Noord offers every kind of door the house knows, and several it rarely meets anywhere else. Along Overhoeks and Buiksloterham, new apartment blocks come with intercom panels, lifts and underground bicycle stores. In the garden villages the front door opens straight onto a quiet street of hedges, and the neighbours are more likely to be asleep than curious. On the dike, houses are narrow, wooden and very old, with a front step directly on the path. Around the shipyard there are converted industrial buildings and a scattering of places to stay for visitors who came for the festivals held on the wharf. Tourists who book a room in Noord have usually chosen it for space and calm rather than for convenience, and after dark the north bank rewards that choice: the sky is wider than anywhere in the old centre, the wind comes straight off the water, and by midnight the loudest thing on most streets is a bicycle chain.











