Home tour: a canal house flat in Amsterdam

Femke and Joost live on the third and fourth floors of a narrow canal house in Amsterdam, built in 1680. The flat is 58 square metres, the stairs are as steep as a ladder and every window looks at water. They showed us how they made a tall, thin home feel calm.

The front room

The main room faces the canal through two tall windows. Everything in it is low, so nothing competes with the view: a long, low sofa, a small round table and a rug the colour of wet sand. The walls are a warm white, and the original beams are painted the same colour, which makes the ceiling seem higher.

"In a house this old, the windows are the architecture," Femke says. "Our job was to stay out of their way."

The stairs

Canal houses have famously steep stairs, built to save space when land was expensive. Theirs rise at almost sixty degrees. They cannot carry furniture up them, so everything bigger than a chair came in through the window, with a rope and a hook on the gable, the way it has for three hundred years.

Every piece of furniture we own had to fit through a window. It is a very good way to avoid buying too much.

Joost

The kitchen

The kitchen is a single wall at the back of the main room: white doors, an oak worktop and one long shelf above. There are no wall cupboards, so the room still feels like one space. A narrow table doubles as a desk during the day.

The attic bedroom

Upstairs, under the roof, the bedroom has a skylight above the bed and just enough height to stand up in the middle. They kept the beams dark here, to make the room feel sheltered, and chose linen in soft greys.

How they made it work

• One colour for walls and beams. The room reads as one calm space instead of a grid.
• Low furniture. It leaves the windows, and the light, free.
• Storage under the stairs. Every step hides a drawer.
• Nothing on the floor that does not need to be. In 58 square metres, floor space is calm.