Old buildings, cold floors: keeping an Amsterdam room warm through the dark months

Nobody books a trip around a radiator. It is, all the same, the thing that most often decides whether a winter evening in this city goes the way it was meant to. A room that is four degrees colder than it should be does not ruin an hour, but it spends the first quarter of that hour getting itself sorted out, and the guest is the one who notices.

This guide is about the mechanics of that, written for someone who has arrived from somewhere with better insulation and cannot understand why the heating is not simply doing its job.

Why the buildings behave this way

The centre of Amsterdam is built narrow, tall and old. A great many of the rooms a visitor stays in sit inside structures that predate central heating by a century or more, and were converted to it in stages, by people working around beams and staircases that could not be moved. The result is a building that is charming from the water and stubborn from the inside.

Three specifics matter. Windows in the old stock are frequently single glazed, sometimes because replacing them is not permitted and sometimes because nobody has got round to it, and a single pane in December behaves like a small open door. Radiators in converted rooms tend to be the ones that fitted the wall rather than the ones that suited the volume of air, so they are often a size down from what the room needs. And staircases in these houses are steep, open and central, which means warm air leaves a room upward and keeps leaving.

None of that is a reason to stay somewhere modern. It is a reason to start earlier than instinct suggests.

Work out which kind of room you are in

There are roughly four, and they behave differently.

A converted canal house room is the one this guide is mostly about: high ceilings, a tall window facing the water, a radiator under it, and floorboards with a hundred and fifty years of movement in them. It is the slowest to warm and the pleasantest once warm.

An attic or upper floor room under the roof is the second. It has the smallest footprint and the largest proportion of external surface, so it swings hardest in both directions. In February it is the coldest room in the building and in July it is the hottest.

A modern hotel room behind a newer facade is the third and the easiest. Double glazing, a heating panel that responds within twenty minutes, and a thermostat that means what it says.

A rented apartment is the fourth and the least predictable, because it depends entirely on whether the owner has upgraded anything. Apartments are also where you are most likely to meet a boiler that has an opinion about how often it wants to run.

The hour before, in order

The arrival window is forty to sixty minutes from the hour being agreed. That is not dead time, and in the cold months it lines up almost exactly with what an old radiator needs. Use it in this order.

Turn the heating up as soon as the hour is confirmed, not when you think she is close. If there is a dial rather than a display, go further than you think you want and bring it back later, because these systems are slow rather than powerful.

Close the curtains the moment it is dark, which in January is before five. A cold pane draws warmth out of a room all evening, and a heavy curtain against it is worth more than an extra degree on the dial.

Deal with the door. If you can feel air moving under it, put a rolled towel along the bottom. In an old house the corridor is often the coldest part of the floor, and the gap under a warped door is a genuine loss rather than a fussy detail.

Check the floor with a bare foot. Floorboards over an unheated space below stay cold long after the air above them is fine, and a cold floor makes a warm room feel wrong. A towel or a rug where you will actually be standing fixes it.

Put water somewhere reachable. A heated room in winter is dry, and an hour of oil work in it is drier still.

Radiators, honestly

Two things go wrong with them here and both are fixable in a minute.

The first is air in the system. A radiator that is hot along the bottom and cold across the top has air trapped in it and is giving you perhaps half of what it could. In a hotel this is a call to the front desk rather than a job for you. In an apartment there is often a small key left in a drawer, and the owner's notes usually mention it.

The second is furniture. A radiator behind a bed, a desk or a heavy curtain that falls in front of it is heating the back of an object. Pulling the curtain to the side of the radiator rather than over it, and moving a chair half a metre, changes a room more than most guests expect.

If the radiator is simply too small for the room, which happens, the answer is a second heat source rather than patience. Ask the desk in the afternoon.

What to ask the hotel, and when

Ask in daylight. The afternoon shift has access to storage, housekeeping trolleys and maintenance; the person on the desk at ten at night usually has none of those. Three requests are worth making.

A second heater, described as a portable one, is the request worth making first in an old building. Many hotels here keep a few precisely because they know their own rooms.

Extra towels, meaning four rather than two, because towels here are often smaller than the beds they are folded on and because oil work uses more than you would guess.

And a straight answer about whether the heating runs all night or drops back after midnight. In a converted building it frequently drops back, and a three hour booking that starts at eleven will feel the difference.

None of these requests needs explaining. A cold room is a cold room.

How warm is warm enough

Around twenty-three degrees is where most guests settle. That is warmer than a room you would sleep in and warmer than the default setting almost any hotel leaves a room on. The reason is physical rather than fussy: oil on bare skin loses heat quickly, a larger area of skin is uncovered than in most other formats, and a room that felt comfortable while you were wearing a jumper stops feeling comfortable about eight minutes in.

The simplest test is the back of your own forearm against the inside of the window frame. If the frame is noticeably colder than the room, the room is still losing ground and needs longer.

Hot water, and why it decides the format

Some formats depend on the bathroom and some do not, and in winter that distinction is worth more than usual. Body to body work needs a warm room, two towels and nothing else. It does not need the plumbing to behave, which is why it is the one suggested when the building is an unknown quantity.

Formats built around water are a different proposition in an old house in February. A small bathroom on an external wall, a shower with a temperature that wanders, and a tiled floor that has been cold since November will all take something out of the hour. In a modern room with reliable hot water they are entirely fine, and at ninety minutes rather than an hour there is time to enjoy them without rushing.

When the room will not warm up at all

It happens, usually in an attic in a cold snap. Three things change and none of them is a cancellation.

Length. Ninety minutes rather than a single hour absorbs a slow start without the session feeling clipped.

Format. Full contact oil work puts the largest possible area in contact and therefore raises skin temperature fastest, so it is the sensible answer in a room that is fighting you.

Blankets. A spare duvet folded across the foot of the bed, used between stretches, does more for a cold room than another hour of arguing with the thermostat.

Write the situation into the thread when you book. A room described honestly gets a different answer from a room described optimistically, and the difference shows up as a better evening rather than as a complaint at the door.

What to put in the first message

Five lines: the address with a floor and a room number, the hour you want in Amsterdam time, how long, one therapist or two, and a sentence about the room. In the dark months that last line carries most of the weight. A converted attic with a small radiator, a ground floor room with a draught, a modern room with a panel that works, all of them change what is suggested back to you and how early you should start heating.

Everyone in the room is twenty-one or over, and a photograph document may be asked for at the door. What a session includes is decided by your therapist, who says where her limits are in the first minutes and keeps them there. The booking page sets out the order the messages run in, the glossary entry on a warm room is the short version of everything above, and the winter evening page puts it in the context of a January night.