Rooms and doors of Jordaan
Look for the hofjes. Behind unremarkable doors on the Jordaan's lanes sit almshouse courtyards founded centuries ago for widows and unmarried women, green squares of silence ringed by tiny houses, a few still open to quiet daytime visitors. They are the district's footnotes, and they explain its temperament: this neighbourhood prefers what happens behind a door to what happens in front of it. Accommodation follows that preference. There are a handful of boutique hotels in merged canal houses, a great many rented apartments up stairs steeper than a ship's companionway, and houseboats moored along Prinsengracht and Brouwersgracht. Plenty of these addresses have no reception at all, and for b2b massage, Jordaan doors without a front desk are ideal. A woman climbing to a third-floor flat on Bloemgracht at eleven at night is doing nothing a neighbour would glance at twice, and the Jordaan, which has watched its residents come home late for four hundred years, does not glance.

