Rooms and doors of Nine Streets
Hotels in this pocket are small by necessity. Many occupy one or two canal houses, with perhaps a dozen rooms, a steep central staircase and sometimes a small lift squeezed in during a renovation. Rooms at the front look over the canal and can be large, with tall windows and beams; rooms at the back are smaller but very quiet. Apartments above the shops are usually reached through a separate street door beside the shop entrance, which is often locked from the inside after nine. Guests at these small hotels are generally given a door code, and there may be no one at the desk at all after midnight. That suits a discreet evening: nobody to pass in the lobby, only a narrow staircase and your own door. On Saturday nights the side streets stay busy until late, but the noise never carries far into the houses.











