The Incidental Guesthouse

One current obsession is with the incidental guesthouse—the sort of property that offers a few rooms upstairs or in an annex, a literal sideline to the main business at hand.

A few weeks ago I spent four nights with my friend Paul at Frédéric in Amsterdam. Frédéric is a bike rental agency that also includes three very simple rooms in its hinter zone. So for €30 per person per night, we had a prime spot on Brouwersgracht, close to Centraal Station in the western Grachtengordel.

Last year in Bratislava I visited Pension Carabic for EuroCheapo. It’s a very plain guesthouse, a series of rooms above a restaurant. At the time, the proprietor who showed me around was really apologetic about the state of the rooms, promising a renovation. (It's been over a year now since my visit, and it's possible that these rooms have been renovated in line with the much more stylish restaurant downstairs.) The rooms were, of course, perfectly fine. Quite bare bones, they benefited from a quiet location just down the river from Bratislava's Old Town. Last summer, a single room at Carabic was SKK 950 (€29; $42).

And another, one I've not yet visited, in Gent: De Brooderie, a set of three rooms above a bakery. A single room at De Brooderie (breakfast included) runs €40; a double runs €60. The prospect of waking up to the morning smells of a bakery is plainly wonderful; the thought of being able to head downstairs for a bakery breakfast makes me want to detour to Gent the next time I'm within a 250km radius.

Incidental guesthouses offer insights into place and culture that many hotels, due to their objective of standardization or their chain-established idiom, do not. They're low on amenities and high on character, and they're often seriously budget-friendly.

Comments

[poet with a day job]

um, yes: I will take the one above the bakery please.