Hotel De Hallen fits in perfectly with the current dynamic in Amsterdam’s hotel world. Approximately half of the almost 100 new hotels that have opened in the city over the past ten years involved existing buildings with a special cultural or historic value being given a second, or even third, life. Moreover, with more and more publicly accessible facilities, these hotels are presenting themselves as true city hotels. Amsterdam’s citizens are therefore increasingly to be found in them – without having checked in.

16,000 m2 of reused space
The characteristics of the halls, which have national listed status, dictated the renovation and reuse project. The architectural office J. van Stigt gratefully made use of the existing architecture – large halls (a total of 16,000 m2), high roofs with clear spans of up to 21 metres, rails in the floors – and carried out fundamental interventions such as opening the hall and extending the passage so that De Hallen really has become part of the Ten Kate neighbourhood.

Pièce de résistance
Vibrancy also characterizes the side of the hotel. Via a pleasant outdoor seating area in Bellamyplein, guests enter the hotel reception and restaurant Remise47. In between they pass through the hotel’s pièce de résistance: an enormously elongated lobby, the result of the loose positioning of two long rows of stacked hotel rooms lengthways in the hall. Marco van Veldhuizen was responsible for the interior design, with numerous tables and chairs comprising an assortment of vintage furniture.

Many hurdles
With regard to this BREEAM certified project, the jury of the 2014 Geurt Brinkgreve Award rightly wrote: ‘It is admirable how, after an extremely lengthy preparatory phase with many administrative and financial hurdles, the private initiative of the TROM Foundation was able to pull off this reuse project. The role and ingenuity of the architect was, moreover, of equal importance.’