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The Directory › Europe › Netherlands › Amsterdam
Plate II · v · a · The City

Amsterdam

A city of identical fronts and entirely dissimilar interiors, which is the best possible arrangement for a directory such as this.

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An Amsterdam canal in flat grey October light, dark brick fronts and black water
Plate II · v · a · The Keizersgracht

The street tells you nothing. Every good house here is a narrow front with a hundred feet of privacy behind it.

A day, properly arranged
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One entry does not need a whole day. It needs an unhurried morning and somewhere to sit afterwards.

The entries

One entry, visited, and kept for the arrangement rather than the pictures.
An empty panelled room in an Amsterdam canal house, cool daylight from tall shuttered windows
Interior · Van Loon, garden room

You go through the house expecting the house, and then the back windows open onto a garden and a coach house and the whole plan explains itself.

OCTOBER, LATE MORNING
Notes for Amsterdam

Van Loon takes an hour and a half if you do it properly, which means walking to the end of the garden and turning round to look back at the house. Most people never leave the first floor, and the first floor is not the point.

The city is flat and walkable and the trams are a courtesy rather than a necessity. From the Keizersgracht everything in this directory's reach is twenty minutes on foot; the bicycles are the only real hazard and they are not joking.

Go in October. The queues at the large museums are somebody else's problem by then, and the small houses — which have no queues in any month — are lit the way they were meant to be lit.

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