Five Thousand Little Houses: The KLM Crown Lounge at Schiphol

Most of my long trips begin with a red-eye out of Montreal, and a fair number of those red-eyes put me down at Schiphol with hours to spend before the next leg. There are worse fates. The KLM Crown Lounge at Amsterdam is the largest I have ever walked into, and one of the very few I would treat as a reason to book the connection rather than something to endure it in.

There is a catch, and it is the same one I ran into in Paris. On a non-European passport, the border queue can swallow the very hours the lounge is meant to fill. Clear it early, though, and what is left is worth the effort.

The KLM Crown Lounge 52 at a Glance
🏠 Five thousand houses · Around 5,000 Delft Blue miniature houses line the escalator walls at the entrance, backed by mirrors that double the count. Each is a wax-sealed bottle of Bols jenever.
🗺️ Five Dutch landscapes · Redesigned by the Amsterdam studio concrete and reopened in 2019, the lounge splits into Polder, City, Dutch Mountain, Sea and Sky, each themed to a piece of Dutch terrain.
🎫 Who gets in · KLM or SkyTeam business class, Flying Blue Gold or Platinum, or SkyTeam Elite Plus, each with one guest. Paid entry is also available, usually from three hours before departure.
⏰ When and where · The non-Schengen Lounge 52 sits between the E and F concourses and opens daily 04:45 to 22:00.
💡 Tip · On a non-EU passport, clear the border first. The queue can eat the very hours the lounge is meant to fill.

The little houses

The first thing the lounge offers is not a seat or a drink. It is a wall of houses. Two escalators carry passengers up from the concourse, and the walls on either side are packed with small blue and white ceramic houses on individual shelves, backed with mirrors so that they repeat away into the distance. There are about five thousand of them in the building. People stop on the moving stairs to photograph them, which does not make the escalator any faster.

They are Delft Blue miniatures, made in the Netherlands, and each one is a bottle. Inside is Bols jenever, Dutch gin, sealed with wax.

The reason they exist at all is a good story. In 1952, American rules barred airlines from handing passengers tangible gifts, on the grounds that it distorted competition. KLM wanted to give its long-haul customers something anyway, so it filled little ceramic houses with gin and argued that this was not a gift at all but a drink to take away, pointing out that no law required a drink to be served in a glass. The loophole held. Seventy years later the houses are collected, traded and hunted, and a new one still appears each October.

One correction to a thing I had assumed for years: they are not for sale here. They are given to passengers flying long-haul business class, one per person, and the lounge simply holds the full run on show. What the lounge does have is a wider choice than any aircraft can carry, and staff who will swap a duplicate for something the collection is missing.

None of which stops the airport selling houses. The shops downstairs are full of blue and white canal houses in the same palette and the same gabled silhouette, and they are not these. They are generic Delft souvenirs, which is a perfectly nice thing to be, but the resemblance is skin deep. The official ones carry a number on the base and a stamp saying they were made for KLM by Bols. No number and no KLM, no KLM house.

The polder

The lounge was rebuilt by the Amsterdam design practice concrete and reopened at the end of the 2010s, and it is split into five zones, each named for a piece of Dutch landscape: Polder, City, Dutch Mountain, Sea and Sky. This is not marketing draped over a room. The zones look different from one another and they are laid out to be used differently.

The Polder is the working, dozing half of the ground floor. Its carpet runs in shades of green, standing in for the reclaimed grazing land the area is named after, and long benches with planting built into them break the space into smaller pockets. Along the wall, a strip of LED light imitates the Dutch sky and shifts through the day, sunset included.

And there are sheep. Not real ones, obviously, but stuffed and standing about on the green carpet as though the pasture were doing its job. They are made from old KLM uniforms, which is the sort of detail that turns a decorating decision into a joke worth catching. There is a pig too. Agricultural landscape, agriculturally furnished.

The Dutch Mountain

The Netherlands is famously flat, so the staircase between the two floors is called the Dutch Mountain, and it is built to be sat on rather than merely climbed. Wide wooden steps rise past landings, tall cabinets of Dutch design, and a mirror ball. At the top there is a DJ booth, which is either a delight or an outrage depending on the hour of the layover.

The best thing in the lounge sits at the top of those stairs, and most people walk straight past it. It is a large panel of blue and white Delft tiles, and the images on them are taken from KLM’s safety video. Brace positions, life jackets, seat belts and oxygen masks, all rendered in the same blue as a seventeenth-century kitchen wall. It is the funniest object in the building and it is also, quietly, the most Dutch.

KLM’s own museum

Along the windows, glass cabinets hold pieces from the airline’s archive. Model aircraft in old liveries, one of them cut away down its length to show rows of tiny passengers in their seats, sit beside vintage suitcases and posters from decades of KLM advertising. It is a small, unhurried museum that happens to have a runway outside it.

Food, drink and the bar upstairs

The City zone is the noisy middle of the ground floor, and it is where the food is. Kitchens cook to order in the open, a barista works a proper coffee bar, and there is a Heineken bar walled in copper. The catering comes from KLM’s partner Vermaat and leans seasonal.

I am rarely hungry off a red-eye, so I cannot pretend to have worked through it, but the spread is wide and the drinks selection wider, with Bols jenever on the shelf, as it should be.

One thing to know before climbing the stairs hungry: the restaurant and bar on the upper floor, both called Blue, are not included. They are paid, and the menu there was composed by Joris Bijdendijk, the chef behind RIJKS, the Rijksmuseum’s Michelin-starred restaurant. The bar counter runs fifteen metres and is lit from beneath.

Somewhere to work

What I actually come for is the quiet. Long wooden counters run along the edges of the lounge with power sockets set into them every few places, stools tucked underneath, and enough distance between one person and the next to spread out without apologising. The lounge is large enough to absorb a crowd, so even on a busy morning there is usually a corner going spare.

The quietest zone is Sea, at the far end, where the carpet turns deep blue and the fittings are built for recovering rather than working. Showers are there, and sleep cabins, though the cabins are charged for.

Getting in

Access runs by cabin or status. A KLM or SkyTeam business or business class ticket qualifies, as does Flying Blue Gold or Platinum, or SkyTeam Elite Plus on any SkyTeam flight, each with one guest. Paid entry exists but comes with a real caveat: KLM only sells it off-peak, when the lounge is not already full with passengers who have access by right, and the price moves rather than sitting at a fixed figure. It is not something to build a plan around.

Bubbly Tips

• Clear the border first, then relax. On a non-EU passport the queue at Schiphol can run long, and every minute in it is a minute not spent upstairs. Build in a buffer and the lounge stops being a consolation prize.
• Follow the signs for Lounge 52. It is the non-Schengen lounge, sitting between the E and F concourses, and it opens daily from 04:45 until 22:00. The way in is an escalator and a boarding pass scan.
• Off-peak is when it is roomy. Mid-morning it can be heaving, and reviewers regularly report struggling for a seat. Early, late or off the main departure banks is when the space works as intended.
• Head up the Dutch Mountain. The staircase is designed to be sat on, and the upper floor is calmer than the ground. If the Polder is full, go up rather than circling.
• Find the safety-video tiles. At the top of the staircase, behind the DJ booth, a wall of Delft tiles reproduces KLM’s safety instructions in blue and white. It is the best thing in the lounge and almost nobody stops.
• The bar and restaurant upstairs are extra. Blue is a paid restaurant and bar with a menu by the chef behind the Rijksmuseum’s Michelin-starred RIJKS. The food downstairs in City is included; upstairs is not.
• Ask about your house. If you are flying long-haul business and were handed a duplicate Delft house, reception holds a wider selection than the aircraft carries and will usually swap it.
• Sea is for sleeping, not typing. The far blue zone has the showers and the sleep cabins, and it is the quietest part of the lounge. The cabins cost extra; the quiet does not.
• Do not count on buying your way in. Paid access is sold off-peak only and subject to space, at a price that shifts. Check the KLM app on the day rather than assuming.

Final Thoughts

Most airport lounges are a chair and a rescued hour. This one is a building with opinions: a fake mountain, a fake pasture with fake sheep in it, five thousand gin-filled houses stacked up the walls, and a wall of Delft tiles patiently explaining how to brace for impact. Somebody thought hard about all of it, and then thought about it a bit longer, and the result is a room I am pleased rather than resigned to be stuck in.

It has ruined a few other lounges for me, which is the risk. And it has done something odder still, which is to make me want to leave the airport. All those little gabled houses lined up against a photograph of the real thing are hard to look at for two hours without wondering about the canal they came from. Amsterdam proper is next.

Until next time!

xoxo,
Bubbly 🎈