Although Royal Horeca Netherlands has no hard data available, anecdotal evidence leads daily De Pers to conclude that Chinese families are moving more and more into the hotel business.

Vincent van Dijk, a ‘trend watcher’ who has taken it upon him to spend a night at a different Amsterdam hotel each night for a whole year, estimates that one in six hotels he stayed in were operated by Chinese people.

Alex Chang of Royal Horeca Netherlands sees a strong growth in hotels operated by second or third generation Chinese Dutch. He also notices investors from China are interested in buying or starting hotels in the Netherlands.

Is this the end of the archetypical Chin. Ind. Restaurant, establishments run by Chinese immigrants but serving mostly a sweet and greasy parody of Indonesian food, a cuisine the Dutch know from their colonial past? It took me a while to find such a restaurant for the photo illustrating this article (Ah Sang on the Overtoom in Amsterdam).

Xaviera Hollander is a former New York call-girl and madam who got world famous with her autobiography The Happy Hooker. Nowadays she runs a bed and breakfast from her villa in the posh part of Amsterdam (right around my corner, although I live in the ‘poor’ part of the posh part).

She has two rooms on offer and a chalet in the back yard, the cheapest for 100 euro, and there is a sort of half-promise of being entertained by the ‘author, Penthouse columnist, legend, performer, [and] raconteur’ Xaviera Hollander herself. If you like, you can let her husband Philip cook you dinner.

(Source image: xavierahollander.com)

Inntel Hotel in Zaandam was officially opened on 18 March and also has a ‘remarkable interior’ with old images of the Zaanstreek (Zaandam area). Each hotel room has a theme, such as Verkade (chocolate) or Albert Heyn (supermarket founder), both major brands that come from Zaandam. Other Zaanstreek traits include the use of famous local mustard and dessert with Duyvekater bread, which are local specialities. The stack of houses has four shades of green and one of blue, which can be found traditionally in the area. You really can’t miss it.

Four of us from ironically four different countries representing three continents drove by this hotel on the way to Paris at Christmas and collectively freaked out. Just looking at this hotel driving by was enough to have an accident. It could be architectural humour, but we didn’t get the joke. We’re too poor to stay there anyways, after all we were carpooling.

(Link: missethoreca.nl, Photo: WAM Architecten)

A painting by French neo-impressionist Paul Signac and estimated to be worth 100,000 euro has been discovered in Hotel Spaander in Volendam, spokes person Marcel Rutten confirmed to AD yesterday.

The painting was a payment for the painter’s stay at the hotel in 1894. Hotel Spaander has a collection of about 1,400 paintings. It billed itself as a painter’s hotel back in the day, still does, and apparently it was not uncommon that residing artists paid their bills with their art. The Signac’s value though was unknown to management, which estimates that this is the best paid bill in its history.

The Signac representing a view of the harbour used to hang off a rusty nail in the lobby. Artists who wish to stay at the hotel can still do so in exchange for paintings, as long as the subject is Volendam, according to RTL Nieuws.

Signac was a contemporary of Vincent van Gogh, with whom he corresponded.

The painting’s true value was discovered during the preparations of an exhibition of the hotel’s art for the Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen.

(Photo of the roof of Hotel Spaander by Flickr user FaceMePLS, some rights reserved)

The owner of an Amsterdam canal apartment had to suffer the indignity of just seeing a wall whenever he looked out of his bathroom window, so interior designers i29 fixed that for him: they added a vertical garden to the wall.

This was enough to land them the Bathroom Design Award 2010 in the Home category. (Unfortunately, the entire ‘site’ is made of Flash, so I cannot link to the 2010 page directly. Just click “Winnaars 2010.”)

The other category, Hotel, was won by Marjolein Garritsen for the bathroom in the Ilyushin Il-18 based hotel room we wrote about two weeks ago.

(Photo: Horizon Photoworks, used with permission. Link: Bright.nl)

Designed by Belgian artist Carsten Höller, you are looking at a revolving hotel room installed in Rotterdam’s Boijmans van Beuningen Museum. You can book this art hotel room for somewhere between 275 and 450 euro a night and have access to the entire museum to visit and enjoy in peace. The big glass plates that the furniture is placed on is what revolves very slowly.

This hotel room is part of an exhibition by Höller entitled Divided Divided, running until 25 April.

(Link: rtl.nl, Photo: boijmans.nl)

This is the inside of a popular Soviet era airliner, the Ilyushin Il-18, which was turned into a big hotel room at Teuge Airport.

It’s got a whirlpool, separate shower, infrared sauna, mini-bar, 3 flatscreen TVs, and so on.

For more remarkable hotels in the Netherlands, see here.

(Source photo: Hotelsuites.nl. Link and more photos: Gizmodo.)

According to a press release issued by the Westin Resort on the island of Aruba (part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), the hotel is offering couples a 210 euro cheque (300 USD) for conceiving babies at their establishment.

“Couples who were inspired by Aruba’s coral mating ritual during their fall getaway (September 1 – December 19, 2009), and can prove they conceived during their stay [by way of a doctor's note], will receive a $300 ‘Conception Credit’ towards a return visit to the resort in 2010. With all the stress of preparing for a new arrival, the expecting parents will surely be in need of a pre-baby Caribbean retreat.”

Just remember that Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, the guy who allegedly kidnapped and killed American Natalee Holloway pretty much ruined any kind of tourism on the island for a very long time. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures.

(Links: bizz, frommers)

‘Gecekondu’ is a type of housing in Turkey that literally means “built in one day,” and that exploits a legal Turkish loophole that says that if you built a house in one night, the authorities cannot tear it down. Estimates say that up to half of the buildings in Istanbul are ‘Gecekondular’ (plural).

It is also the name of a one-room hotel in Amsterdam that DUS architects came up with. The building is entirely made of big square shopping bags and sits atop a pontoon. Visitors can draw the bridge at night to keep unwelcome visitors away. Staying a night is ‘free,’ that is to say, you are expected to perform chores in payment.

Parool calls it surprisingly cool (Dutch).

(Photo: DUS Architects, which has an extensive web page about this project.)

Camping ‘t Buitengewoon Groenhoff in Vriescheloo, Groningen, is using sewer pipes to build a ‘bear hotel,’ although intended to house paying human guests instead of bears.

The ‘caves’ will each have a bed and two chairs, and are meant to house the participants of team-building sessions and similar outings. Apparently, the brainstorm that led to this idea was drenched in beer. Staying a day under these spartan conditions will set one back about 100 euro, a price that includes three meals.

The camping is not the first to use sewer pipes as rooms, a hotel in Austria has done something similar before.

See also: 25 years of wine barrels as hotel rooms.

(Photo: ‘t Buitengewoon Groenhoff. Link: Bright.)