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Hempel has designed two hotels in London—Blakes and The Hempel. Blakes Amsterdam has just opened. "I didn't intend to do a hotel in Amsterdam, but with a building like this you don't hang back, you grab the opportunity. Quickly."

The history of the building is as rich as anything she could imagine, a story going back to 1637, a time in that remarkable golden age when the Dutch East India Company was creating untold wealth and every rich merchant wanted a house on one of the three new residential canals. On Keizersgracht, among those houses, the first theaterin the Netherlands was erected, a fine stone building set behind stone arches that served as ticket booths and as the entrance to a front courtyard.

The theater flourished, Rembrandt sketched the actors, Vivaldi once conducted the orchestra, and royalty came from all over Europe. Then one nightin 1772 there was the inevitable tragedy of candles and flammable scenery. Only the stone arches, a sandstone porch and a few charred beams remained.

Land was valuable, and a new structure—administrative offices for a Catholic charity—soon went up on the old foundations. The governors of the charity were wealthy men, and they wanted the same tall windows, splendid doorways, marble entrance hall and delicate plasterwork that they had in their own homes. A decade later they expanded, adding a long room, where those in need could take shelter while waiting in line to collect their alms, and a bakery, where they could receive fresh bread.

Those rooms remained unchanged for two centuries. Their transformation began a few years ago when a new owner who intended a sensitive conversion to apartments realized that such a building deserved more. How about a hotel? He had stayed at Blakes in London (see Architectural Digest, April 1988) and loved it from the minute he saw the entrance hall, filled with that wonderful koloniaal feeling—bamboo, a large umbrella, antique Louis Vuitton trunks. He rang Hempel, who came to Amsterdam and decided in about two minutes thatit was something she had to do. "It's a great building," she says, "tall, aristocratic and proud."

The rest is history, a new history fora new Amsterdam, where the economy is booming and the city is alive with young people who know the pace in New York, Paris and London and want a hotel and a restaurant as stylish as they are. Amsterdam had nothing like that. The moment was right.

Those who know Blakes in London, Hempel's boat on Majorca (see Architectural Digest, January 1997), her house in the country (see Architectural Digest, October 1994), her house in London (see Architectural Digest, September 1989) and her work for clients (see Architectural Digest, May 1999) will recognize the style but spot the differences that make the rooms specific to the place. Her rooms may be inspired by romantic dreams of exotic worlds, but those dreams are grounded in something firmer than the clouds.

It's as though she leafed through a good book on Amsterdam late at night and by morning all the facts had rearranged themselves with a logic of their own. The spice trade of the Dutch East India Company became the colors of ginger and turmeric for bedrooms. The shadows of Rembrandt became every shade of dark—navy and black and, for doors and windows, that particular shade of Dutch green, "more black, less blue, than the Paris green," she says. Blue-and-white china multiplied to regiments of huge pots wherever she set them down, and the discipline of a William and Mary garden took over the courtyards. "Tall ships, tall houses, tall clipped trees—you can't go sidewaysin a small country," she points out. "Discipline was important to them, and it's important to me."

If visions of a Dutch past didn't enter her consciousness before she designed the rooms, she was happy to add them afterward. She describes the black umbrellas in the garden courtyard as "the black cloaks of a few Flying Dutchmen passing through." The blue-and-white plates she designed for the restaurant could be from the Nanking Cargo, the Dutch shipment from China that lay at the bottom of the sea for some two hundred and thirty years before it was retrieved, much of it in perfect condition.

The hotel has twenty-six bedrooms, which are grouped together by colors. Some are "the color of ginger in a beautifully crafted slate box, a thin line of ground turmeric across the top"; others are the navy and black of kimonos. Rooms off the garden courtyard are "the greens of lavender and rosemary"; rooms up under the Dutch gablesare light and airy, beige and white. Some rooms are simply "elephant and raspberry," a description with no explanation except her own glorious sense of the absurd.

Corridors echo the color of the rooms they serve—a good thing, too, since Dutch buildings tend to deal in half levels, and the plan is complicated. Colors help explain the territory.

But then there are quite a few things that might need explaining. After dinner, chocolates arrive in a cloud of dry ice, to be cooled in the billowing vapor, then twiddled in the coffee, "something to do while you're finishing the conversation, signing the contract, closing the deal," she says.

Staff will explain about the chocolates; they will explain about all the ways that guests can temper the light coming in through tall windows to suit the mood or the time of day by sliding slatted screens or linen panels and adjusting window blinds or draperies. "I want that kind of control of my environment," says Hempel, "so I give it to my guests. On the other hand, if pulling screens around doesn't fascinate them, they can just enjoy what I've set up."

She gives guests all the things she finds essential. Minibars are stocked with canisters of oxygen for a pick-me-up, Berocca antistress vitamins, ginger chocolate, sleep masks, an energy drink and candles scented with grapefruit or amber. She finds cameras handy, so there is one in every room.

"It's my lifestyle that's offered here," she acknowledges. "This place is very much about instructing people. I don't want to see someone's baggy trousers, and the word slouch doesn't exist in my vocabulary. Comfort? If a choice has to be made between style and comfort, style wins every time. Creating a mood is the most important thing. The champagne tastes the same if you're sitting bolt upright or sunk back into a sofa, so you might as well be upright, because you look better."

Hempel is both a couturier and an interior designer, and she has to work fast—in London doing a couture collection one day, on the far side of Europe decorating a house the next. To create this hotel she would fly in, put on her apron and go into action, moving from one room to another, getting one worker set up, moving on to another, returning to inspire, to pass on another jolt of the energy that she carries with her like her own personal force field.

"Sure, I'm hyperactive," she says. "I make my staff a bit hyper too, but motivating someone else is what gives me a buzz. I never make decisions on paper; everything is decided after I've shoved things around myself, layered up more screens in a room, hung more draperies at a window, stacked more cushions on a chair, placed more towels on a rack. I tell my team, Be bold, go chunky, get butch and strong. If you like something enough to buy one, buy the lot. You'll never see them again.'"

In addition to designing the hotel, she manages it. The chef was trained in London to cook what Hempel calls "my own eccentric tastes." She elaborates: "Thai food with Japanese stylization. I like the colors pale green, black and white on a plate. I like a sauce to be poured to a perfect demilune, I like spices strong enough to notice them, but I allow guests a little bowl of coconut milk or crème fraîche to cool it off if they prefer."

Staff are taught how to place each glass, coffeepot or sugar bowl precisely on its own square of slate, how to maintain the careful geometry of every table setting. Nimble fingers are trained to tie lime peel into little knots to decorate every glass of water, to bundle chives with another sliver of chive for the top of a salad or to roll up tiny mint leaves for the top of a pomegranate sorbet.

"And did you know it's said that William and Mary introduced the pomegranate to Holland?" she comments. "That's why we have pomegranate sorbet." No detail escapes her attention.

The hotel is already so popular that it's not easy to get a room or a table for dinner, and people who know her hotels in London are suddenly thinking it would be nice to take a trip to Amsterdam. "If people like what I do, that pleases me," says Anouska Hempel. "It's my total world, my whole life, that they're coming to."