Crazy Dutch Apartments – The Red Room

There are some very unique places to live in Amsterdam. However, none are as unique as the apartment I lived in when I first arrived in the country. Of all the crazy Dutch apartments I have seen it remains the craziest.

It had all the features you might expect to find in a typical Amsterdam apartment; stairs so steep they could be reclassified as a ladder, a slightly un-trust worthy looking cylindrical gas heater that clunked loudly every time it was turned on, a general level of disrepair and very territorial mice.

It also had a few slightly unusual design additions of its own. A spare bedroom without a door, a window looking out onto a brick wall and a toilet/shower that was accessed via the kitchen. However, it was none of these features that made it really stand out. They were odd but they were nothing compared to the strangest part of the apartment… The Master Bedroom.

The Master Bedroom took up the entire top floor of the building (but somehow managed to seem smaller than the floor below). Once upon a time it had been the attic. It was still accessed by a set of stairs that simply emerged into the room from a corner of the floor. They creaked and made it possible to view the entire room from floor level as you entered. From this slightly odd angle the weirdest feature of the room (and the whole apartment) was instantly obvious…

Every single surface of the master bedroom; the walls, the two halves of the angled ceiling that met at the top, the cracked wooden beams that supported them, even each individual floor board that formed the uneven floor had been painted… bright… red…

It is probably important to mention at this point that I had not seen the apartment before I moved in. My new employer had ‘kindly’ arranged it for me before I had even arrived in the country.

Everything in the room was red. The only surface that had escaped the insane colour scheme unscathed was the glass windows. The frames themselves had not been so lucky.

I don’t know if the interior designer had been colour blind or insane. Maybe there had simply been a heavy discount on red paint that day. Either way it certainly gave the room a very striking look. A look that said, “Those of a nervous disposition may not wish to sleep here.”

I certainly didn’t recall the landlord saying anything about the room being evil when he handed me the keys. The questionable colour choice seemed to suggest otherwise though. It was entirely possible that I had just taken up residence in the Dutch version of The Amityville Horror.

As if the room was not creepy enough it was also completely empty apart from a small wooden bed. It had been carefully positioned in the very centre of the room like some kind of alter. There was no other furniture. No other decorations. No other distractions. It was just the bed, the endless colour red and nothing else… Unless you count the spiders.

I’m not afraid of spiders but I might have developed arachnophobia within the first few moments of standing in that room. They were everywhere. Spiders had hung their webs in every possible spot that you could hang a web. I suddenly had visions of waking up in the middle of the night, discovering that I had been cocooned to the bed by a group of arachnids who’d decided they didn’t want to share the room.

The apartment was supposed to be my home for the next three months. It seemed unlikely that my sanity would hold out that long. I did the only logical thing I could do. I went down stairs, found the vacuum cleaner, brought it upstairs and evicted all the spiders.

Do you have any stories of crazy Dutch apartments? Are they weirder than the Red Room? Alternatively, check out the Accidentally Dutch Crazy Dutch Apartments Survival Guide.