Amsterdam hotels collection

That an Amsterdam house leans towards the canal says nothing about its foundations: it was built that way, so that furniture hoisted on the beam under the gable would not strike the windows. Beneath the brick façades, wooden piles run down through the peat to the sand, and the palace on Dam Square rests on a whole forest of them. In the Spaarndammerbuurt, Michel de Klerk set the brick rippling around Het Schip. In the passage of the town hall, a bronze bolt fixes the level from which the country's heights are reckoned; beside it, two columns of water follow the tide at IJmuiden and Vlissingen, above and below that mark.