Four years in, I gutted the layout and turned the building back to front.
The original floor plan put the best rooms upstairs at the front and buried the entrance, kitchen and lounge at the rear. Looked good on paper. In practice: street noise in the suites, confused guests at the back door, and our best square metres doing the least work. So we turned it around — dorms and sleeping capacity into the basement, kitchen up to street level, bar and entrance moved to the front with room for a terrace. Did the whole rebuild ourselves, bar tiling, electrical and plumbing, phased around the low season so the hostel never closed. Reopened on our fourth anniversary. Kept refining it after that: a new city map with the beach added on the back, a DIY walking tour, a second courtyard graffiti jam in a lighter, sunset palette, a restored Peugeot Rapido scooter in Kingkool green lacquer. During COVID we redid the Art Room — the calendar wallpaper had gone yellow, replaced with a hundred screenprints from a well-known Dutch printer — and turned the old Bunny Room into the Super Super Dutch Room: second-hand kitsch bed, carpet on the table, all in.
