W Amsterdam Review: Two Buildings, One Hotel, New Operator

I booked the W Amsterdam in February. A week later a court in Amsterdam ordered the company running it to leave the premises, and every travel forum I read told people to think twice before staying there. That is not the sequence anyone wants before a trip.

So this post answers a question most hotel reviews never have to: what happens when a five-star hotel changes hands three weeks before the reservation date.

The short version is that nothing went wrong. The longer version involves two listed buildings, a government architect with a Frank Lloyd Wright habit, a shower shaped like a capsule, and one of the better plates of pasta I ate in the Netherlands.

W Amsterdam at a Glance
🏛️ What it is · A 238-room five-star W split across two listed buildings on Spuistraat, behind the Royal Palace, three minutes from Dam Square.
🔀 Two halves · The Exchange (grey, industrial, red-accented rooms) and the Bank (gold-toned rooms, spa, The Duchess), across a public street from each other.
🛎️ The operator change · The previous operator was evicted in early 2026; Corendon took over under the W brand in April. My May stay showed no sign of trouble.
🍝 Best bits · The rooftop W Lounge and dinner at The Duchess in the old banking hall.
💡 Tip · Ask which building your room is in when you book; the Exchange and Bank are genuinely different stays.

A Hotel in Two Halves

The W Amsterdam is not one building. It is two, standing on opposite sides of Spuistraat, three minutes from Dam Square and directly behind the Royal Palace.

The larger half is the Exchange. Approaching it from Dam Square, it presents a wall of brown brick with horizontal concrete banding and almost no ornament, and I will be honest: at street level it does not sell itself. Beside the carved stone of the Royal Palace it looks like a municipal office block that wandered into the wrong century.

The building has a better story than its face suggests. It went up as the Rijkskantoorgebouw voor het Geld- en Telefoonbedrijf, the state office building for the money and telephone service, to a design by Joseph Crouwel, who held the post of rijksbouwmeester, or government architect. Crouwel took his cue from Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Larkin Building in Buffalo, which is where the horizontal banding, the cantilevers and the deliberate plainness come from. Amsterdam lists it as a municipal monument.

Knowing that did not change my opinion of the facade. It did change what I was looking at.

The building also behaves differently after dark. The entrance sits under a lit canopy on the Spuistraat side, with a second W built out of glowing bulbs beside the door, and at that scale the brick stops being the point.

The name on the wall beside the hotel’s own belongs to Mr Porter, the steakhouse at the top of the building, which sends its guests up from these same doors.

Across the Street, the Bank

The other half is the former KAS Bank, and it makes no attempt to be modest. Grey stone, rusticated masonry, and an entrance framed by heavy columns. The gold W standing against the wall at number 172 belongs to this side of the street.

The original design dates to 1908 and is credited to F.W.M. Poggenbeek. The building then grew in stages, and the extension on the Paleisstraat corner was designed in 1932 by Christiaan Posthumus Meyjes jr for N.V. Kasvereeniging, the institution that eventually became KAS Bank.

The two conversions were handled by Office Winhov of Amsterdam. Working on a bank is a particular problem, because the plan a bank needs and the plan a hotel needs have almost nothing in common. Vaults sat on the ground floor and in the basement, the ceremonial hall sat above them, and offices filled the upper storeys. That layout is why the restaurant is up a staircase rather than off the pavement, and why the spa is underground.

Alongside them sits X BANK, a shop and exhibition space given over to Dutch designers, which occupies the Spuistraat side of the same building.

What Actually Happened With the Operator

Here is the part I worried about, set out plainly.

Marriott does not own the W Amsterdam. Marriott owns the W brand. The buildings have belonged to the German property fund Deka Immobilien since 2017, bought in a sale and leaseback arrangement for 260 million euros.

The company operating the hotel was Palace Hotel Operational, part of the Amsterdam group Sircle Collection. Reporting indicates it stopped paying most of its rent from 2023 onwards. In February 2026 an Amsterdam court ordered it to vacate within fifteen days. Figures for the arrears reported at the time ranged from roughly 22.8 to 23.4 million euros.

Reporting at the time indicated Marriott ran the hotel directly in the gap that followed. In April 2026 the Dutch travel and hotel group Corendon took over operations under a long-term lease, keeping the property in the W brand. Corendon had held a Marriott franchise agreement covering several Amsterdam hotels since 2022. The Duchess, Mr Porter and The Butcher continue to operate independently. A full refurbishment of the interiors has been announced, without a date.

I checked in on 1 May, roughly three weeks into Corendon’s tenure and three days before the arrangement was publicly confirmed. Nothing about the stay suggested a hotel in trouble. Housekeeping was punctual, the front desk answered on the first ring, and the restaurant ran a full service on a Friday night.

The Deluxe Exchange Room

Check-in is on the ground floor, quick and unfussy, and the lift does the rest. My room was a Deluxe Exchange Room, in Crouwel’s building. Grey walls, a red rug, white bedding, and line drawings running across one wall in pale grey.

The colour scheme should not work. Red, grey and white in a room with a concrete floor sounds like a car park. In practice the rug does the heavy lifting, warming a palette that would otherwise be cold, and the drawings stop the walls reading as blank. A framed portrait in hot pink hangs on the opposite wall, which is either the best thing in the room or the worst, depending on the morning.

The window runs nearly floor to ceiling, in black steel, and looks across the street to a plain pale facade with plane trees in front of it. Not a canal view. The light is the point, and in a room this narrow it does most of the work, bouncing off the pale walls until the whole space reads larger than its floor area.

The bed sits low and faces the window, with the drawings running along the wall to one side. Sockets and switches are gathered on a small tower beside the headboard rather than scattered along the wall, which is the sort of decision that only becomes obvious when a hotel gets it wrong.

Along the window runs a long upholstered banquette with cushions, a side table and the drinks unit at one end. It works better than a desk would have, because it can be a sofa in the evening and a place to spread out a map in the morning.

Storage sits behind two tall orange doors: robes, an iron, a kettle, an umbrella and a stack of pull-out drawers deep enough to swallow a week of packing. The colour is a shock every time the doors open.

The Glass Pod

The shower is a curved capsule of frosted glass standing out in the room rather than tucked behind a wall. The basin sits outside it on a long concrete counter, with a backlit mirror hovering above on a steel post.

This arrangement divides people, and I understand why. The frosted glass obscures detail but not presence. Anyone in the shower reads as a shadow to the rest of the room, and no amount of design intent changes that. The loo, at least, sits behind a solid door of its own.

So this is a room that depends on who else is in it. With a partner, none of it matters. Travelling with a colleague or a friend it would matter a great deal. Alone, it is simply a very usable counter, with more space than most enclosed bathrooms twice the size, sitting in the room’s daylight rather than in a windowless box.

The toiletries are Skin Regimen, in 300 ml pump bottles rather than sachets, which is a small mercy.

Small Things Done Well

Hotels at this price tend to be judged on the grand gestures. What actually decides a stay is the twenty small objects a guest handles between arriving and leaving, and this is where the W Amsterdam is quietly good.

A Marshall speaker sits on the ledge behind the bed. It pairs in seconds and it works, which is not always true of hotel audio.

The drinks tray is stainless steel, holding a cocktail shaker, glasses, a Nespresso machine and a bottle of Amsterdam-made vodka with a price card propped beside it. The shaker is the giveaway. Most hotels stop at a corkscrew and a kettle.

Underneath, a drawer slides out. Snacks sit behind a glass lid on one side, priced and legible without being handled. Coffee pods, tea and a corkscrew fill the other, and the coffee and tea are complimentary.

The split is the useful part. Anything chargeable sits under glass, so the prices can be read without picking something up and hoping it has not landed on a bill somewhere. The coffee pods are Dutch, and the card sitting with them makes a point of their being biodegradable. Small gestures, but they add up over two days.

The W Lounge and the Terrace

The lift goes to the top of the Exchange, and the doors open onto a floor that wraps around an internal courtyard and runs the length of the building, holding the lounge, the bars, Mr Porter and the terraces. A gold mirrored W stands roped off near the lifts, and beside it there is a photo booth printing strips stamped with the hotel’s name. It is a small thing, and it does more to set the tone than any amount of marble would.

The lounge itself is the reason to stay here, and it is the one part of the hotel that is difficult to photograph badly. It runs along the roof in glass, with two open fires, plants at the scale of small trees, and books shelved into the window mullions.

Late afternoon is the hour to be up there. The sun comes in low along the glass and the whole floor turns the colour of the brass fittings. In good weather the doors stand open and the room runs straight out onto the terrace, where the roofline of Magna Plaza sits close enough to count the turrets.

There is a neat piece of geography in that view. The hotel sits inside Crouwel’s old telephone building, and from its roof one looks straight across at the old post office. Two arms of the same Dutch institution, staring at each other for a century.

Dinner at The Duchess

The Duchess occupies the former banking hall of the KAS Bank, and walking in from the street up a staircase into that room is the best entrance in the building.

Marble columns, a stained glass ceiling, hundreds of small glass lanterns strung in long spirals, and an antique longcase clock standing in the middle of the floor. It could easily have been all show. It was not.

I had the hand-crafted pasta with braised short ribs. Wide ribbons in a dark braising sauce, shredded beef running through it, and a mound of grated hard cheese on top.

Service was attentive without hovering, and paced properly across a full room on a Friday night. For a restaurant whose parent operator had just been evicted from the building upstairs, that is worth recording.

Bubbly Tips

• Ask which building at the time of booking. The Exchange rooms are the industrial, grey and red ones. The Bank rooms are the gold-toned ones. They are different stays, and the booking engine does not always make that obvious.
• Pack for the crossing between halves. The spa, The Duchess and X BANK are in the Bank building, and the rooms in the Exchange are across a public street. Going from a treatment back to your room means stepping outside.
• Book AWAY Spa before you arrive. Advance appointments are required for treatments and for access to the WET area. WET and FIT run from 9am to 9pm and are restricted to over-16s. The spa is not wheelchair accessible, as there are several staircases.
• Treat the rooftop pool as a place to lie down. WET Deck measures roughly 21.8 metres long, 3.1 metres wide and 1.1 metres deep. It is built for lounging with a view rather than for lengths.
• Budget for Amsterdam’s taxes. Since 1 January 2026 VAT on accommodation in the Netherlands has been 21%, up from 9%. Amsterdam’s tourist tax adds 12.5% of the room rate before VAT on top. Check whether a quoted price includes both.
• Reserve The Duchess well ahead. Weekend dinner and the afternoon tea in the tea room both fill quickly, and the tea is a separate booking from the restaurant.
• Go up for a drink even without a room. The W Lounge admits visitors who are not staying at the hotel, which makes it a straightforward way to see the roof if you are based elsewhere in the city.
• Sit on the Magna Plaza side for the best view. The terrace wraps the building, and the side facing the old post office gets the most interesting roofline. The Royal Palace is on the opposite flank.
• Give X BANK ten minutes. The Dutch design shop in the Bank building is worth a look, but confirm current opening hours before making a trip, since the hotel changed operator in 2026 and some things are still settling.
• Walk rather than drive. Dam Square is a two-minute walk and Amsterdam Centraal is a short tram ride. Driving into this part of the centre is awkward, and parking charges here change often enough that any figure printed online is worth checking on the day.

Final Thoughts

I arrived expecting to write a cautionary post. Instead I spent two days in a building I had underestimated from the pavement, drank in one of the better rooms in the city, and ate braised beef under a stained glass ceiling in a former bank hall.

The change of operator was invisible from a guest’s side of the desk. That is not a guarantee for the future, and the announced refurbishment means the rooms I photographed may not look like this for much longer. But on 1 May 2026, three weeks into a new arrangement that half the internet had written off, the W Amsterdam ran like a hotel that knew exactly what it was doing.

Crouwel’s brown brick still does it no favours from Dam Square. Go in anyway.

Until next time!

xoxo,
Bubbly 🎈