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[00:00:00] Suzanne Oxenaar: Airbnb didn't exist, and the city was asking for spreading of tourism. And this project was exactly a fantastic example for it because we see the neighborhood as the lobby of the hotel room.
[00:00:24] Matt Welle: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another Matt Talks Hospitality. This week, I wanted to talk about a hotel that is a very different type of hotel, and I'm gonna take you down the canals of Amsterdam. I live in Amsterdam, and very often when I leave my house, I walk past these bridge houses. There are these little homes that are built on bridges that used to open the bridges, and they have now been turned into a hotel, which is a very exciting concept, and they're spread out all over the city. And I love the usage of unconventional space to turn it into a hotel space so that people can experience Amsterdam the way that it was intended. I wanna read this because I wanna make sure that I get this right. So today, I'm joined by Suzanne Oxenaar, who is the curator and artistic director at SWEETS Hotel. She's the Co-founder behind several concept hotels here in Amsterdam, including the Lloyd Hotel and Cultural Embassy, the Love Hotel in Tokyo, and the Hotel The Exchange, besides Hotel Suites. Thank you so much for joining me today. Can you talk me through? You're an unconventional hotelier, I imagine. What's your inspiration behind, like, turning real estate into hotels?
[00:01:28] Suzanne Oxenaar: Well, it started one moment when Otto Nan, my business partner, called me and said, he's an art historian, didn't you want to start a hotel one day? And I said, “Well, yes.”
[00:01:41] Matt Welle: How hard can it be?
[00:01:42] Suzanne Oxenaar: Yeah. So then, he said, “Well, I heard the city is looking for a new concept for the Lloyd Hotel, which was always called the Lloyd Hotel, but it was built as a hotel for immigrants coming from Eastern Europe, going to South America. It was a prison, it was an asylum seekers’ place for Jewish people coming to the Netherlands, it was a young boys’ prison, it was art studios, and then we thought, okay, what we miss in the Netherlands is a place where we welcome cultural guests, actually, where we use their cultural luggage. So, they are coming with a lot of information. So, how can we share this information? And we thought we can do that if we make a cultural embassy and we understand who our guests are. We give them the possibility to present themselves, but also we are connected with members like museums, like the theater, like cultural institutes, so that we very quickly can connect them.
[00:02:45] Matt Welle: Yeah.
[00:02:46] Suzanne Oxenaar: So, our hotel was built with MVRDV Architects. And the first hotel from 1-5 star, I heard you—
[00:02:53] Matt Welle: What does that mean? Like, I'm so confused of what, like, and I have stayed there ten years ago, but can you explain maybe what that means, a 1-5 star hotel?
[00:03:00] Suzanne Oxenaar: Well, it meant that on the one hand, we used old spaces that were there, small and big. It meant that some rooms, 1-star rooms, had a shared bathroom in a hall. But most important was that no matter what your financial situation is, whether you come as a group, we had a design where you fell out, we had a room with a bed for 8 people, or whether you are, let's say, the worst paid person in a film, you could all stay in the same place. In that sense, it was, let’s say…
[00:03:32] Matt Welle: Let's say levels of people in society kind of blend together in one space.
[00:03:35] Suzanne Oxenaar: Exactly. And on one floor.
[00:03:37] Matt Welle: And do you find that people that booked the one star and people that booked the five star are actually mingling and really cross over?
[00:03:44] Suzanne Oxenaar: It's really no problem. We had, at certain points, you had football supporters, and let's say, IDFA, having the hotel as a festival hotel.
[00:03:55] Matt Welle: So good.
[00:03:56] Suzanne Oxenaar: Everybody coming together. Yes.
[00:03:58] Matt Welle: So, why has the world not adopted that model? If it worked for that particular place, what was so special and unique about it?
[00:04:04] Suzanne Oxenaar: Well, I think in a way, the world has adopted because more and more you see in hotels, libraries, cultural places, and public spaces. A certain amount of hotels is much more aware of, yeah, where they are and what the possibilities with often huge spaces are.
[00:04:25] Matt Welle: Yeah. So, you're obviously not here to not talk about the Lloyd Hotel. You're talking about the hotel that's today, the SWEETS Hotel, but it's not a hotel. Can you explain to people how it works?
[00:04:36] Suzanne Oxenaar: Yeah. It works. Well, maybe I have to start a little bit at the beginning because it has to do with the Lloyd Hotel. Space & Matter architects and Igor Sancisi from Grayfield came to us, and they said, we’d like to wake up where we want to be. So, their idea was that they wanted to have a hotel room, let's say, right in front of artists or right in front of a museum. We were talking about that, and they thought we, as hoteliers, would be interested in that. But that's almost impossible to build something new in Amsterdam.
[00:05:12] Matt Welle: Yeah.
[00:05:13] Suzanne Oxenaar: But Igor had heard that the city was looking for somebody who wanted to rent all the bridge watchers' houses because they were going to stop using them, because they were centralizing the management of the bridges.
[00:05:27] Matt Welle: Because just for people who are not from Amsterdam, may we explain what a bridge house actually is?
[00:05:32] Suzanne Oxenaar: Okay. So you have a bridge, and on the bridge is a little house. And often, you see the little house, but there's a big thing under it like an iceberg, and that's the construction of the bridge. In the bridge house, there was a bridge watcher sitting, and if the ships come, he would open or close not only the bridge, but also make sure that people wouldn't end up in a canal.
[00:05:56] Matt Welle: Right.
[00:05:57] Suzanne Oxenaar: And, yeah, because they were centralizing this and putting cameras and loudspeakers and putting all the bridge voices together, the houses are not needed anymore.
[00:06:08] Matt Welle: And was it hard to go from a bridge house, which wasn't purpose-built for a hotel room, to convert that into something that works for people to sleep in?
[00:06:17] Suzanne Oxenaar: In a way, it was very hard because often the spaces are quite small. They all had a toilet, but none of them had a shower, or none of them had the ambiance for a hotel room. And not only that, all of them have different architects. That means different materials, different locations, different sizes, different periods of building. So, to change them was quite a challenge, and for many, many more reasons, like the fact that they are all in different parts of Amsterdam, which means you have different rules. The fact that they don't have addresses is because they are on a bridge.
[00:06:55] Matt Welle: Yeah.
[00:06:56] Suzanne Oxenaar: But if you want to be on Google or if you want to order a taxi, you must have an address. You have a lot of noise because the bridge is still going open and close and often, there are streetcars going over the bridge.
[00:07:11] Matt Welle: It's all part of the charm, otherwise.
[00:07:12] Suzanne Oxenaar: It’s all part of the charm. It's also the charm for us because it's like a big lesson in architecture to begin with, like…
[00:07:21] Matt Welle: Because the moment they came to you and they said, we've got these 28 bridge houses." Can you do something with it? Was your immediate thought "absolutely not," or was your immediate thought, "Let's figure it out"?
[00:07:32] Suzanne Oxenaar: We all wanted to figure it out. And then we started that. It took almost seven years before we started this. And so we made a plan. We brought it to the city. We were allowed to develop it. Took quite some effort. One of the things we did was we made a sweets box, this is also a little bit where the name comes from. And all the houses we made into are not chocolates, but more like lollies. And we put them on some tables in the city hall. The architects organized an international group of architectural students to put all their fantasies on these houses. So, they made a beautiful exhibition about it. That was an architect who made the maquettes of all the houses. We had a presentation in ARCAM, the architectural museum. So, more and more we were presenting these houses, and finally we got the right to develop them. And then, of course, we had to find finances.
[00:08:35] Matt Welle: Yeah.
[00:08:35] Suzanne Oxenaar: So, we have quite a lot of people who invested in it. And then you have to start opening them up. And what you find in them is sometimes layers of cheap office or again another location for, let's say, a coffee machine. Yeah. So, together with Space&Matter, we redesigned them. And we had a very nice system, or we have a very nice system, because now we are working on the Berlagebrug Bridge. So, then how we work is we have our so called design picnic, and the architects, but also somebody from housekeeping, the general manager, we all come and look at the space and see what are the possibilities in this space, what would give an extra layer, what would make it comfortable, where can we put a boiler, or where can we put a vacuum cleaner. That's always quite a nightmare. Huge thing.
[00:09:39] Matt Welle: Yeah. Because housekeeping can't be easy.
[00:09:42] Suzanne Oxenaar: Housekeeping is quite something.
[00:09:44] Matt Welle: Because you have a map with you, and maybe we can very briefly show people how it's set up, because this is not all in one location. This is Amsterdam, and it looks like they are very much spread out all over the city.
[00:09:56] Suzanne Oxenaar: They are very much spread out. There's even one that you can hardly see. It's on IJburg, so it means, actually, in Amsterdam you have, like, the circling, that's one river. And along that river, to say it simply, you have a lot of houses, and then you have the Amstel. And along the Amstel, you have a lot of rivers. And then you go over to the north of Amsterdam, where you have the North Holland Canal, where again you have a lot of houses. And then of course in the harbor of IJburg.
[00:10:26] Matt Welle: Because if I am a visitor to Amsterdam, I get a choice of which part of Amsterdam I want to experience, but not live in a specific location. I think that's the thing that excites me about really living in a city, where very often I wake up in a hotel room, and I don't know where I am because it's some bland hotel that I stay in. How do you bring the local into the little house? Do you think differently about each little house and where it's located, and the surroundings of it?
[00:10:54] Suzanne Oxenaar: When we started, it was a moment when Airbnb didn't exist, and the city was asking for spreading of tourism. And one of the things we thought is, like, how can we get people to other neighborhoods? And this project was exactly a fantastic example for it because we see the neighborhood as the lobby of the hotel room. So, in the hotel room, we have an iPad with a lot of information about exactly that neighborhood. So, what can you do in that specific neighborhood? It does have a little cinema, or it does have a very nice skate park, or that's where you can get the best food, you know, or the market is at that time. So, in that sense, we try to get people who come to visit.
[00:11:40] Matt Welle: Because in a normal hotel, I wake up and I go for the big buffet of breakfast. How does breakfast work, for example?
[00:11:46] Suzanne Oxenaar: Well, we tried with serving breakfast in the houses, but that was a complete nightmare.
[00:11:51] Matt Welle: Yeah, I can imagine.
[00:11:54] Suzanne Oxenaar: If it was not only because the bridge was open and you come too late, because you have to wait for the bridge. No. That's impossible to do. Two of our houses have a kitchen. Actually, three now. No, we want the people to go and have breakfast outside and to explore.
[00:12:08] Matt Welle: To explore the local cafes.
[00:12:10] Suzanne Oxenaar: Yeah.
[00:12:11] Matt Welle: And then cleaning? Like I've seen bicycles go around, and I think that they had your branding on. Is that correct?
[00:12:16] Suzanne Oxenaar: That's true. Yes. We have bicycles, and housekeeping brings the clean sheets and everything in the house. Each house has a vacuum cleaner and some other things. But basically, there's no place to have anything. Some of the houses, as you have to imagine, are really small, like really small. And housekeeping, so we have an office where we gather in the morning, where the clean sheets are coming, where we have a reparation department, because always something is happening in these houses. And they start in the morning, and they start cleaning with the bicycle.
[00:12:55] Matt Welle: Amazing. I love it. I love how Dutch that is that you got by bicycle. And if you step away from it and you look at it operationally, because it does sound like something that's hard to manage.
[00:13:06] Suzanne Oxenaar: Mmhmm.
[00:13:07] Matt Welle: When something is so geographically spread out. What would you say is the biggest challenge of running a business like this?
[00:13:13] Suzanne Oxenaar: Well, you really, really need housekeepers who like to do housekeeping and cycling. That's quite a, you know, it’s kind of a…
[00:13:20] Matt Welle: A requirement.
[00:13:21] Suzanne Oxenaar: Double combination. You have to really like your project because it is very intense and very inefficient in certain ways, because not only that they are everywhere, but they are also all different.
[00:13:35] Matt Welle: Yeah.
[00:13:36] Suzanne Oxenaar: It's all different. Like, it's not like the lamp is wrong in this one, I know exactly which lamp it is. No. Or which house is that? Okay. Oh, the Rietveld house, okay, we need these special lampshades, you know, you can't get them. And it's like, so, I think a big challenge is to keep them. It's also a house. It's like a little house family that you have to keep up standards also. And what is really difficult also is that because you are in the middle of the city and the city is all the time, like now you have the Overtoom Bridge, it's closed, or the walls are…
[00:14:11] Matt Welle: Always something.
[00:14:12] Suzanne Oxenaar: There's always something, and that's going to be very disturbing for what you're doing as a hotelier.
[00:14:19] Matt Welle: Yeah. Because, as you think about a guest who books a room or a house, how do you build their anticipation, or how do you make them understand what they've actually booked? And it must be the same challenge that you've had with Lloyd's Hotel. How do you have them understand the concept?
[00:14:34] Suzanne Oxenaar: Sometimes they really don't understand.
[00:14:36] Matt Welle: Really
[00:14:37] Suzanne Oxenaar: Because sometimes people will call you and say we can't find the hotel because the image that they have of a hotel…
[00:14:43] Matt Welle: Big lobby.
[00:14:44] Suzanne Oxenaar: … is not like a very small little house that they're probably standing in front of. Yeah. Communication, it's totally different than the Lloyd because in the Lloyd's, people come in the actual building and your first meeting is with the reception. You talk with somebody. You can easily explain something to somebody. In this case, everything goes by mail or by telephone. It's very important how we pick up the phone, how we understand, let's say there's also a difference in generation. Some people like you have to open your hotel room with your telephone. For some people, that's more easy than for other people. You have to anticipate really in the conversation.
[00:15:29] Matt Welle: Yeah. It's a fun challenge, I guess it sounds like. A fun challenge to figure out with the customer, and how do you explain it to make sure that they don't have a bad experience?
[00:15:36] Suzanne Oxenaar: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:15:37] Matt Welle: Because then, so are reviews generally positive? Do people actually end up loving it, or do they like right this is not for me?
[00:15:43] Suzanne Oxenaar: It's so amazing, like totally different than in any of our other hotels. Let's say 99% of the guests write a letter. So, we have beautiful books of all these letters, or people make a drawing of the house, or they leave something in the house. It's a totally different attitude than we used to in the other hotels.
[00:16:07] Matt Welle: I love that.
[00:16:08] Suzanne Oxenaar: Yeah. It's really nice. It's really, maybe also like we leave for everybody a handwritten welcome. And because that is also your most personal moment, and that contact person is also the person that you're communicating with. And we have somebody, this is also like for the reception, we have a receptionist, but the night receptionist is in Italy, but he knows all the houses. He knows everything.
[00:16:38] Matt Welle: He’s living in Italy?
[00:16:39] Suzanne Oxenaar: He's living in Italy. He knows all the houses. Because in this case, normally in a reception, somebody needs a towel, you walk upstairs. But in this case, you can't anyway. So, because he knows so well how things rule, what can be the problem, who to call if immediately action is needed.
[00:17:00] Matt Welle: It's so good. So, you've basically digitized the entire guest experience despite still having a very rich heritage of Amsterdam.
[00:17:07] Suzanne Oxenaar: Mmhmm.
[00:17:08] Matt Welle: You've been able to figure out how do I do local real estate that feels genuine and engaging, whilst also offering this digital journey, which often we as a technology company people are like oh you're making hospitality less human. And I'm like, I don't think so. I think there's other ways to approach it.
[00:17:25] Suzanne Oxenaar: To be honest, without Mews, this hotel wouldn't be possible because also, you have to understand how to communicate a hotel which is actually 28 different locations.
[00:17:37] Matt Welle: Yeah.
[00:17:38] Suzanne Oxenaar: And I think in many ways we have a lot of difficulties, but we also can use all the new technology. So, that's very interesting.
[00:17:49] Matt Welle: Like what I love, what I learned about your hotel concept was when we started Mews twelve years ago, the first hotel we opened was a hotel in Prague, and we never purchased a reception desk. We thought the idea of this reception desk was anti-hospitality. It's a place where you queue, and then you get ignored by a receptionist who's typing data into some system. And we said, let's just not buy the desk and let's see what happens. And you get stuck with systems, so we end up having to build a system so that we can have hosts with tablets that can basically sit down in the lobby with you and create this really homely experience. And I love that you've taken what we've done twelve years ago and just gone this far with it, where you don't even need the lobby, but you can now understand and see these beautiful architectural buildings and experience the local things and use technology to enable that in some way. And hearing and seeing the story, it makes me so proud that we can build something that gets used in very creative ways. And you know we have many hotels that operate like a typical standard hotel with a big reception desk, but it's the things that you do that are very, very special, and I just love how far you've pushed hospitality. Thank you. Can I ask what you want to do as a next project, or what are some of the ideas that you have for the hotel of the future?
[00:19:03] Suzanne Oxenaar: The funny thing is, I don't think so much like that. I think more things come on your way. I would like to make a hotel somehow for homeless people, and then maybe in Amsterdam, particularly, economically homeless people. For immigrants.
[00:19:20] Matt Welle: What does that mean? Yeah.
[00:19:21] Suzanne Oxenaar: And I would like to give them a lobby with a very warm welcome, but particularly very clear information.
[00:19:29] Matt Welle: Because what's the challenge in Amsterdam today for the homeless? Like, what's the thing you're trying to change, or what would you love to change?
[00:19:37] Suzanne Oxenaar: I would love to see no people sleeping on the street.
[00:19:40] Matt Welle: Yeah.
[00:19:41] Suzanne Oxenaar: And that's many more than you think. Like really many more. Yeah.
[00:19:45] Matt Welle: It is hard to see it happening. And especially on a rainy night when you see them sleeping in a door opening.
[00:19:52] Suzanne Oxenaar: And especially when you focus on sleeping. You know what I mean? So, that is something.
[00:19:57] Matt Welle: Do you feel in a liberal country like the Netherlands, are we still not doing enough?
[00:20:02] Suzanne Oxenaar: We're definitely not doing enough.
[00:20:03] Matt Welle: No?
[00:20:04] Suzanne Oxenaar: No. Not at all. And it could also be a lot more creative. There are already a combination of, let’s say, asylum seekers and students on IJburg. Some time ago, we were thinking about a hotel like the Bijlmerbajes, and people were thinking what to do with that. So, there were many thoughts about how can you make a combination where, so to say, a part of the cheap rooms are paid. Let's say the 1-5 star combination, but then in a different way.
[00:20:36] Matt Welle: But the Movement Hotel that went into the Bijlmerbajes building for a temporary period actually was helping, I think, refugees from Syria at the moment, at the time, right?
[00:20:44] Suzanne Oxenaar: Yes.
[00:20:45] Matt Welle: It was such a lovely concept, and then it's gone again.
[00:20:49] Suzanne Oxenaar: To make something like that really functioning. I think that's…
[00:20:55] Matt Welle: I think that's a wonderful goal to have in the future. And if in any way I can help you with that, I am always inspired by hoteliers that try and defy our very traditional industry and try and do things in creative ways. And I've been a big fan of you since the Lloyd Hotel. That was a hotel that I stayed in, and I thought this is so different. And I think it's a good thing that you inspire hotels. And then what you do with SWEETS Hotel is really fun. So, if in any way you've got a project, let me know. I would love to figure out how to help you.
[00:21:25] Suzanne Oxenaar: I know what you're seeing, yeah?
[00:21:27] Matt Welle: It's on camera now. Thank you for pushing the boundaries of hospitality. It's an industry that I get very passionate about, and there's always reasons why we don't do it. But I don't feel like you have reasons why you don't do it. You only find reasons why you should do it. And it is really wonderful to see. Thank you for joining me today.
[00:21:44] Suzanne Oxenaar: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
