Hotel description

For a couple of years now, Peter Lute’s restaurant has been luring foodies from Amsterdam out to the suburb of Ouderkerk aan de Amstel. Now there’s another attraction: a row of seven old cottages alongside the river has been converted into a sort of minimally serviced apartment-hotel, each cottage a separate unit.

This is more than just a place for Lute diners to lay their heads. This is one of the first forays into architecture for the famed Dutch product designer Marcel Wanders, whose beautifully strange objects (his famous Knotted Chairs, made from resin-soaked rope, among them) fill his artfully renovated spaces, making Lute Suites not just a gourmet’s crash pad but something of a live-in Wanders exhibition as well.

It’s distinctly un-hotel-like — there’s no lobby or public space to speak of, and each cottage has its own front door. Inside, each one of the suites is completely different in style, but all are outfitted in a sort of minimal luxury; hotel amenities like minibars are conspicuously absent, but creature comforts abound, including lavish modern bathrooms and kitchenettes. Breakfast comes from the Lute restaurant, which is, after all, the reason there’s a hotel here at all. It’s a design statement unto itself, a renovated 18th-century gunpowder factory. But don’t let your eye distract you — here the focus, always, is on the food.