American Hotel

Amsterdam just calls it the Americain. The hotel’s official name has changed again and again with its owners. The café on the ground floor is still the Café Américain.

The first American Hotel on this corner was finished in the early 1880s. It lasted about twenty years. Around 1900 it was pulled down, together with the rest of its block, to make room for this one.

The architect was Willem Kromhout. His hotel is usually called Art Nouveau, the new style of those years. The heritage register puts it more carefully: close to the manner of Berlage, the architect of the Beurs, but made far livelier by all its galleries, bay windows, balconies and dormers.

The part people know best is on the ground floor. The Café Américain dates from 1902. It has an Art Nouveau interior with stained glass, and a reading table said to be the oldest in Amsterdam, where artists and intellectuals have long liked to gather.

One of them was the writer Harry Mulisch. In the 1950s he sat at that table regularly, and arranged for someone to telephone him there. Then the call would be announced across the café, telephone for Mr Mulisch, and he could walk to the phone with everybody watching.

The hotel grew in the late 1920s, with a wing along the canal designed by G.J. Rutgers, and again in 1954.

The name over the door has been less steady. In 2020 the hotel became a Hard Rock Hotel. In 2023 an Irish hotel group took it over and renamed it Clayton Hotel Amsterdam American. The café and the bar kept the name Americain.