Nuru in a Small Hotel Room: Twelve Square Metres, Well Used

A lot of rooms in central Amsterdam are small. Not small by a brochure's standards, where any room without an armchair is called cosy, but genuinely small: a double bed with half a metre of floor on either side, a suitcase with nowhere to go but the carpet, a bathroom whose door has to close before you can reach the basin. People staying in rooms like these sometimes assume the gel needs a suite. It does not. The technique needs warmth, a bed and a shower, and a small room holds all three. It simply asks for ten minutes of arranging.

Clear the floor first

The biggest obstacle in a small room is luggage. An open suitcase between the bed and the bathroom is a trip hazard even when everything is dry, and on bare feet with gel on them it is worse. Close it, stand it upright and push it into the wardrobe or under the desk. Shoes go the same way. If there is a luggage rack, clear it for her bag, which gives her a surface at a sensible height for the bottles and towels instead of the floor.

The chair earns its place too. Clothes that would otherwise land on the bed go over it, and the chair goes in the corner furthest from the sheet.

The bed against the wall

In the smallest rooms the bed is often pushed against one wall, sometimes beneath the window. You do not need to move furniture, and in many hotels you should not try. What helps is knowing that the therapist will work mostly from the open side and from the foot, and that the gel will be kept away from the wall and the curtain. If the frame is light and there is room, easing it a hand's width from the wall gives the sheet space to tuck. Otherwise the sheet is tucked along the open edges and held along the wall with a folded towel.

Heat goes further in a small room

Here the small room has a real advantage. Twelve square metres warms in a few minutes where a high-ceilinged suite takes half an hour, and a hot opening shower with the bathroom door left open lifts the temperature of the whole space. The one caution is an air conditioning unit mounted above the bed, which in a compact room blows straight onto the sheet. Switch it off or set it to heat rather than leaving it on a fan setting; a draught across gelled skin undoes all the warmth the shower created.

The bathroom

Small hotels have small bathrooms, and they come in three kinds. Some are prefabricated pods with a moulded tray and a curved door, perfectly good for a rinse taken one person at a time. Some are wet rooms, where the whole floor is tiled and falls to a drain and the shower has no enclosure at all; these are excellent for gel, since nothing on the floor can come to harm and the rinse can be as unhurried as you like. And some, in newer design-led rooms, are glass boxes standing inside the bedroom, which look dramatic and keep the rinse very close to the bed. Whichever you have, a towel goes down outside the shower door, and the walk from sheet to water is taken slowly.

Light and sound

Ceiling lights in a small room are harsh and there is nowhere to escape them. Switch them off and use the bedside lamp, or the desk light turned to face the wall, which gives a low, even glow without glare. Thin walls are more common in compact hotels, and while nothing in a session is loud, any music is best kept soft. A white noise track playing from a phone left in the bathroom masks the corridor surprisingly well.

One therapist, not two

This is the one real limitation. A four-hand session needs space for two women to move around the bed and two bags to be unpacked, and in a room this size they would spend the hour stepping round each other. Book a single therapist for the gel, or move the four-hand evening to a larger room on another night. A slow sensual massage is the other good option in a truly tiny space, since it needs no sheet at all.

The rest of what matters, the mattress, the sheet and the width of the bed, is covered in the note on nuru on a hotel bed. And if you are staying in one of the compact townhouse hotels of the old centre, the pages on Leidseplein and the Red Light District describe the particular rooms those streets tend to offer.