Hotelier Carmen Atiyah de Baets’s guide to Amsterdam

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Growing up in suburban Holland, I always dreamed of living elsewhere. I was born in Amsterdam but we left when I was eight. I went to London for college because it felt bigger – at the time, Amsterdam didn’t have as much going on as other cities. But over the years, more people opened restaurants, cafés and delis. I came back to see my parents and experienced the city coming alive. When my husband and I decided to return, it felt like a good time to open our own place.

We moved back in 2018 and turned an old canal house that belonged to my husband’s grandmother into a boutique guesthouse. We wanted to incentivise people to visit Amsterdam for other reasons than it has typically been known. The first two rooms opened in 2021, and when the adjacent house became free, we added a store, café and another guestroom; the buildings are connected by a garden at the back. It’s a typical Dutch home that I’ve infused with my Lebanese heritage.

Most of our flowers come from Flower LovesMe, which is run by a guy who used to do the flowers for the Royal Gardens in London: he has lots of stories. We’re also around the corner from what used to be Amsterdam’s old antiques street. Sadly, a lot of these shops have closed down and been replaced with things that are more geared towards tourism – that’s one of the reasons we wanted to maintain our property – but there are still some really beautiful stores sprinkled around, such as Umbria, an art gallery in the museum quarter.

A beautiful thing about living here is that you can swim in the canal before and after work

If you’re visiting Amsterdam, get ready to eat a lot of bread, cheese and pickled fish. When I come back after being away for a while, the first thing I want is a cheese sandwich. My favourite cheese shop is Kef – we’re famous for gouda, but I like a hard goat’s cheese. The best fish store is Tel, and Louf is a great bakery: they make amazing bread and pastries and there are benches outside. It’s very local.

There’s a word in Dutch, gezellig, that’s untranslatable into English, but it’s basically a feeling of cosiness. As the winter is quite tough here – the weather can be really awful – there are a lot of smaller places where people can come together. In every neighbourhood you’ll find what we call a “brown” café, which is similar to an English pub. You know that at 4pm you can have a beer and a bitterbal, a fried Dutch snack, and it’s going to be good. There’s a great one in the city’s old centre, Café De Engelbewaarder, which has jazz on Sundays. 

Amsterdam has a half-moon-shaped network of canals. In the middle, there’s Centraal Station, and on the far left you have the Jordaan. There’s a great farmers’ market there on weekends – go for oysters in the summer and mushroom toast in winter – and an amazing wine bar, Twee Prinsen, which my husband is involved with. Also in that area is Toscanini, an Italian restaurant that’s been around for almost 40 years. And I love Gebroeders Hartering. It specialises in meat, which we don’t eat a lot of at home, but I like it for a date night. 

If you live here, you bike. If you’re visiting, you should walk. It’s such a small city – it’s not a mission to go anywhere – but you need to layer up. Our style is quite similar to the Danes in a way. I’ve tried to add a bit of fun by stocking Dutch brands such as Flore Flore, a high-quality T-shirt line, and Extreme Cashmere at my store. The latter does wearable sweaters in loads of different colours that make a simple outfit a bit more special. 

A beautiful thing about living here is that you can swim in the canal before and after work. (In winter, I go to an art deco sauna called Sauna Deco.) I fell in love with the city again because of the swimming – and also because there is so much multiculturalism. Part of the reason I wanted to leave in the first place was because I was the only person with a mixed background in the area I grew up in. But there’s actually a lot of that in Amsterdam; I just didn’t see it when I was younger. If you go to the market, it’s not just cheese – you can get Indonesian food and amazing falafel. If I want Lebanese food, I go to the east side of the city. People come for the weed and the red-light district, but there’s so much more than that here.