South African designer Jacu Strauss has a bit of a thing for complicated buildings. His first hotel interiors project, the Mondrian London, was housed in Warren Platner’s iconic Sea Containers House building on the river Thames. Strauss was working for Tom Dixon’s Design Research Studio at the time, and acted as a senior designer on the project, which saw the huge office block transformed into a cruise liner-inspired hotel with a rooftop bar, restaurant with private dining rooms, cinema and a spa.

“It was a complicated project,” says Strauss. “It was quite an unusual building, so it was definitely a challenge. Luckily, I like making my life difficult.”

Strauss has since left Tom Dixon's Design Research Studio to go it alone, but his latest project, the Pulitzer Amsterdam, is no less challenging.

Strauss was asked to act as creative director for the restoration of the five star hotel, which is situated along the Prinsengracht and Keizersgracht canals in central Amsterdam. The project involved restoring and redesigning the 25 interlinked canal house buildings that comprise the hotel. The buildings – which were gradually bought up over the years by Peter Pulitzer (grandson of newspaper magnate and Pulitzer Prize creator Joseph Pulitzer) to create a five star hotel – are more than 400 years old, and are situated in a UNESCO World Heritage zone, meaning there were lots of restrictions on the building work. The building is a maze of labyrinthine corridors and staircases which open out suddenly onto unexpected open spaces, and it was Strauss’s job to make sense of it all.

“It took me about 18 months to really understand this property,” says Strauss. “I’ve come here every week for the past two and a half years, and I have stayed in every single one of the 225 rooms. It was all part of making sense of the property, of living and breathing the city and understanding the context of the hotel.”

The hotel was part of the Starwood group until 2015, and an attempt had been made to make the interiors look as uniform as possible. “That was problematic, because the building is so varied - the rooms are all very different, one part of the building is narrow, and then it suddenly becomes wide, you have to go up and down stairs to navigate it,” says Strauss. “I find that very charming, and I really wanted to highlight the fact that this building is unique.”

So Strauss took a different approach. Instead of trying to unify the interiors, he made each room very different, meticulously researching the history of each building and working to incorporate that history into the design. The building was stripped right back, so that Strauss had a blank canvas to work with. The result is an imaginatively designed hotel that blends contemporary design with historic features to great effect. Quirky references to the history of the buildings and also to its location feature throughout – from bicycles on the wall, to panelling in the bar inspired by the front doors of Amsterdam’s grand canal houses. Strauss approached the design of the hotel’s four Collectors Suites by imagining what previous occupants over the past four centuries might have left behind – the Book Collector’s Suite, for example, features its own library, an old typewriter, a cracked leather chair and an amazing curved bookshelf.

The hotel is privately owned, which gave Strauss and the team a certain freedom with the design.

“It was a really nice opportunity, as the hotel isn’t really associated with an operator, so we didn’t have to apply existing brand values,” he says. “That meant we were able to start from scratch and have the hotel create its own brand identity.”

Phase one of the restoration was completed in March, with 80 refurbished guestrooms and suites, alongside a new restaurant and bar. The second phase, which has just finished, involved the restoration of the buildings on the Prinsengracht side of the canal, as well as the creation of a new lobby and a courtyard garden – a rarity in central Amsterdam.