“The shower has no walls, no curtain, no apology — it just stands there in the middle of the room like a modern art installation that also gets you clean.”

The 62 bus drops you at a roundabout that doesn't feel like Amsterdam. No canal houses, no coffeeshop neon, no bachelor parties stumbling past with matching t-shirts. Schepenbergweg is all low-rise offices and residential blocks, the kind of street where someone is always walking a golden retriever and the loudest sound is a bicycle bell two roads over. You pass a tennis club, then a stretch of trees thick enough to muffle the A10 motorway humming somewhere behind them. The Amsterdamse Bos — the city's enormous managed forest — starts just south of here, and you can smell it: wet bark, leaf mulch, that green-earth scent cities aren't supposed to have. It takes about twenty-five minutes from Centraal Station by public transport, and by the time you arrive, the canal-ring Amsterdam you expected feels like a different city entirely.

Fletcher Hotel Amsterdam sits at the end of this quiet suburban road like a conference center that decided, at some point, to have a personality. The lobby is clean and corporate — polished floors, a front desk staffed by people who are efficient without being warm, the faint smell of industrial carpet cleaner. Nothing about the check-in prepares you for what's upstairs. The elevator opens onto a long, hushed corridor. You swipe your key card. You step inside. And there, in the center of the room, is a glass-walled shower standing in open space like it owns the place.

The room that went viral for a reason

Let's be clear about the shower. It is not tucked behind a partition. It is not separated by frosted glass that grants you some dignity. It is a transparent glass box positioned between the bed and the desk, roughly where you'd expect a coffee table. If someone is sitting on the bed watching Dutch television, they are also watching you shower. This is either a bold design choice or a relationship test, depending on who you're traveling with. Solo, it's amusing — you towel off with a view of your own suitcase. With a partner, it becomes a conversation piece that writes itself. The hotel knows what it's doing. This is the room's whole personality, and honestly, it works.

Beyond the shower situation, the room is straightforward. A wide, firm bed with white linens that don't pretend to be luxurious but sleep perfectly fine. A flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. A desk by the window that catches good morning light. The minibar is stocked but priced the way airport minibars are priced — I'd skip it. What the room does well is space: there's enough of it to spread out, unzip everything, let your trip breathe. The blackout curtains actually black out, which matters because Buitenveldert is quiet enough at night that you'll sleep deeply and wake up disoriented, unsure for a moment which country you're in.

The Wi-Fi holds steady for streaming but hiccups during video calls — I lost a connection twice in one afternoon, which may have been a blessing in disguise. The walls are thin enough that I could hear my neighbor's alarm at 6:45 AM, a tinny electronic beep that became, by the second morning, almost comforting in its reliability. Breakfast is a buffet spread in a ground-floor restaurant: decent bread, good Dutch cheese, surprisingly strong coffee, and a scrambled egg situation that's better than it needs to be. I watched a man methodically construct a sandwich involving four types of hagelslag — the chocolate sprinkles the Dutch eat on bread with zero irony — and stack it three layers high. I admired his commitment.

“Buitenveldert doesn't try to charm you. It just goes about its business, and if you pay attention, that becomes its charm.”

The neighborhood reward is the Amsterdamse Bos. A ten-minute walk south puts you on forest trails where runners pass in silence and herons stand motionless at the edges of ponds. You can rent a bike at the park entrance and ride for an hour without crossing a road. There's a goat farm — Ridammerhoeve — where you can drink coffee and watch children lose their minds over baby goats, which is better entertainment than most museums. Closer to the hotel, the Gelderlandplein shopping center has a decent Albert Heijn supermarket for picnic supplies and a handful of restaurants that cater to locals, not tourists. Try Brasserie Lof for a simple but well-executed lunch — their uitsmijter, the classic Dutch open-faced egg sandwich, is textbook.

The 62 bus connects you to Station Zuid in about twelve minutes, and from there the Metro will have you at Centraal in another fifteen. It's not instant access, but it's not exile either. The trade-off is real quiet at night and room rates that the canal district would laugh at. For travelers who want Amsterdam but don't need to sleep inside it, the math makes sense.

Walking out

On the last morning I take the long way to the bus stop, cutting through a residential street where someone has lined their front garden with ceramic frogs. Dozens of them, glazed green and orange, arranged in rows like a tiny amphibian army. No explanation. No sign. Just frogs. A woman cycles past with a cello case strapped to her back, and somewhere behind the trees the motorway hums its low, constant note. The 62 arrives on time. The city center pulls you back in. But for two nights, the edge of Amsterdam was the whole story — transparent shower and all.

Rooms at Fletcher Hotel Amsterdam start around 99 US$ per night, which buys you that surreal shower, a quiet street, and proximity to a forest most visitors never find.