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.

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

14 Responses

  1. Rasa says:

    What I about red walls? With spiders you managed to make order but red walls…. Pfff… I would get crazy in such a room in a minute..Or that was a room of Sweeney Todd???
    In fact I’ve seen more red rooms or kitchens here and I don’t know what dutch has to do with this special color…the same with all variation of blue.. or maybe in shops they really have constant discounts on these two colors:)

  2. Invader_Stu says:

    Rasa – I couldn’t do anything about the wall apart from bang on them when ever I heard a mouse running around behind them… which was a lot. It might explain a few things about the current condition of my sanity. I’m glad I did not see Tim Burrton’s Sweeny Todd while I was still living there.

  3. Martijn says:

    Time for a “Red” version of the “The Dark Room” youtube game..

  4. Invader_Stu says:

    Martijn – Oh my god. I just googled what The Dark Room youtube game is and it is the best thing ever. Thanks :D

    For anyone else who wants to play it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvkjP6dqpfY

  5. Kristy says:

    Hi Stu, do you have any blogs on Carnivals celebration here? Need a crash-course/ survival guide to the endless days and nights of carnival happening this friday till tuesday. Cheers

  6. Invader_Stu says:

    Kristy – Unfortunately I do not but it could be a good idea for the future.

  7. VallyP says:

    Do you think the previous occupant might have been the Scarlet Pimpernel? Or maybe just a scarlet woman? Or perhaps someone who wanted to see things through rose tinted glasses…

    As for the spiders, doesn’t sound like you evicted them to me…you vacuum packed them!

  8. Terri says:

    Even allowing for the spiders (which I’m not), and the awful red color, how weird was it to sleep on the lone bed in an empty room?? I think I might have opted for the spare bedroom without the door–much easier to escape from, too.

  9. dragon lady says:

    And you never told us, except about one mouse Mr Bojangles.

  10. Nathalie in NL says:

    Not directly related, but if you have some time I feel like this news article could do with an Invader Stu cartoon:

    http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2013/02/no_large_hats_for_the_new_king.php

  11. Invader_Stu says:

    VallyP – The weird thing is there had been someone living there up until the day before me. That has to mean that person was sleeping in the room with all the spiders.

    Terri – I guess I should have done that too. I’m not sure why I did not.

    Dragon Lady – I didn’t?

    Nathalie – Haha. I could imagine it would be very annoying to be sat behind someone with a large hat.

  12. Yvette says:

    I’ve been apartment searching in Amsterdam these past few weeks, and this sounds straight out of many a place I’ve looked at. At least I don’t have to live in them though ;-) (well YET, landlord hasn’t accepted my offer yet- fingers crossed!)

  13. Red is my favorite color, but even I have to admit that a room entirely painted in the color is a tad bit too much. Just a tad, though.

  14. Alice says:

    Haha that reminds me of my place when I was on exchange in Bologna. It was not weird in exactly the same way, but the spirit of weirdness was comparable. It had been an old monastery, but they just put walls in strange places to turn it into an appartment, and generations of students had done the rest in painting every room in a different color. The kitchen was deep red – an unfortunate choice, because it was the size of a stamp and had no windows. Still, don’t you find such features endearing and/or romantic?

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