In Roermond, a 19th-century jail has been reborn as one of the Netherlands' most distinctive hotels - where the cell doors are original, the fine dining is serious, and checking out is entirely optional.
There's something about sleeping somewhere that once held people against their will - especially when the cell has been fitted with a king-size bed, a whirlpool bath, and a Nespresso machine. Het Arresthuis, a former prison in the southern Dutch city of Roermond, opened as a five-star hotel in 2011 and has been confounding expectations ever since.
The building dates to 1863, the original cell doors are still on their hinges, and the bars remain on the windows. What has changed is everything else. Where prisoners once shuffled between solitary confinement and a bucket in the corner, you now check in with a glass of champagne, get walked to your room by a staff member who knows the building's history, and find a handwritten card and homemade cookies waiting on the pillow.
Location
Roermond sits in the province of Limburg in the southern Netherlands, close to the German border and the river Maas. Het Arresthuis occupies a monumental building right in the historic center - within a two-minute walk of the old town's characteristic streets, squares, and cultural landmarks including the Cuypershuis museum.
The Designer Outlet Centre, one of the largest in the Benelux region with around 150 shops and 200 brands, is a ten-minute walk away. For those arriving by train, the station is less than a kilometer from the front door - which, unlike the original, you are free to walk back through whenever you please.
From Prison to Five-Star Hotel
The building was designed by state architect Allard Cornelis Pierson and opened as a prison in 1863. Similar facilities were built around the same period in Goes and Dordrecht, but Roermond's has since become the best-preserved of the group. For nearly 150 years it functioned as a working jail, housing over 100 cells in its central wing - a panopticon-style layout that allowed a single guard to oversee almost the entire block from one position.
The prison closed in 2007. In the years immediately before that, the building had taken an unusual detour: after being decommissioned as a conventional jail, it served as a temporary holding facility for drug couriers intercepted at Schiphol airport.
All the locks had been stripped out during decommissioning, so the cells were secured with a pair of sliding bolts from the local hardware store, price tags still attached. Of the 108 cells in the wing, only one - the solitary confinement cell, now room 10, identifiable by its double doors - had a toilet. The rest made do with a bucket on request.
The building was purchased in 2008 by Rob Polman and his father Cees, already established in Roermond through the nearby TheaterHotel De Oranjerie. Before renovation work began, the family held what Rob describes as a spiritual cleansing: a party for 300 people in the cell block, intended to symbolically clear 145 years of captivity before the builders moved in the following morning.
The renovation took two years and was, by any measure, a considerable undertaking. Converting a space designed for maximum confinement into one intended for comfort required cutting four openings through thick cell walls for every new room - three former cells were combined to create each of the Comfort rooms.
Two additional escape staircases had to be constructed, which meant cutting vertically through the building's structure. To keep everything stable, four tension rods were threaded through the building and anchored to the rear facade.
What could be saved was saved. The cast iron staircases, the truss structures, the walkways, and the original cell doors were all retained. The walls, however, had to be cleared - and with them went the handwritten texts left by former prisoners. The renovation team photographed every inscription before stripping them back. Some of the milder ones now appear in select rooms and on the bread bags in the restaurant. Others did not make the cut.
In 2018, Het Arresthuis became the first Van der Valk property to receive five-star status. Restaurant Damianz earned 16 points from Gault Millau the same year.
Damianz: Fine Dining In The Former Reception
The hotel's restaurant occupies what was once the prison's reception area - the point through which new inmates arrived and through which, eventually, they left. The name Damianz nods to Bishop Damianus of Roermond, the figure behind the project name Quartier Damianus under which the broader site was redeveloped. The bishop, it turns out, was known for a fondness for good food, which the hotel considers an appropriate historical coincidence.
Chef Jeroen van Gansewinkel has run the kitchen since the hotel's early years. He knew by seventh grade that cooking was his direction, went on to train in some of Limburg's more serious kitchens, and now builds menus around seasonal and regional ingredients with what he describes as worldly influences on a classical base. Shellfish and poultry appear frequently. The format is a set multi-course menu - you choose between four, five, six, or seven courses for dinner, with a shorter culinary lunch available on select days.
The front-of-house operation is led by maître-sommelier David Manders, who started in a part-time service role at the hotel and worked his way up over the years to his current position. His focus is European wines, and he approaches pairing with the kind of specificity that comes from having watched a lot of very different guests sit down to the same tasting menu.
The Cell Block
The historic cell block is the architectural centerpiece of the building and remains, structurally, more or less as Pierson designed it in the 1860s. The long, rhythmic rows of cell doors - originally more than 100 of them - still line the corridors, now painted and polished rather than institutional. The cast iron staircases and internal walkways that connected the tiers are intact. Looking down the length of the wing, it's easy to understand how a single guard could once have monitored the entire space from a fixed point.
The attic above the cell block, once used to store prisoners' personal belongings - each item numbered and catalogued against its owner's return - now houses the fitness room and sauna. Getting up there required building an elevator into the structure, which was its own engineering exercise.
The Rooms
The 40 rooms across the hotel divide broadly into two categories: those in the cell block itself, and the suites, which occupy what were the director's quarters and staff offices in the main building. All rooms retain some connection to the original structure - the cell doors, the barred windows, the vaulted ceilings that emerged during renovation when lowered false ceilings were stripped away. Each suite is named after a figure from the prison's working life: the judge, the lawyer, the warden, the director.
Deluxe Cell
The Deluxe Cells were created from the former recreation rooms of the prison rather than from the cells themselves. At 32 square meters (344 square feet), they are among the more spacious standard rooms, and come with a double bed, seating area, desk, minibar, flatscreen TV, and rain shower.
The atmosphere leans into the building's history without overdoing it - these are comfortable rooms that happen to sit inside a 19th-century jail.
Suite De Rechter
The Judge's Suite draws its design references from English judicial imagery - taupe, white, and grey form the color palette, with a painting of the English judicial power above the desk anchoring the theme. At 43 square meters (463 square feet), it comes with a king-size bed, a fireplace with a seating area, and a bathroom fitted with both a whirlpool bath and a rain shower.
Suite De Directeur
The largest room in the hotel at 60 square meters (646 square feet), Suite De Directeur occupies the former living quarters of the prison director. The suite has a generous living area with two sofas and a flatscreen TV, while the whirlpool bath and rain shower are positioned in the bedroom itself rather than in a separate bathroom. When the renovation was complete, the team invited the prison's last director to stay as their first guest. He was, apparently, familiar with the location.
Suite De Cipier
The Warden's Suite takes its name - and its color scheme - from an old blue jailer's cap found during the renovations. The shade of blue pulled from that cap now runs through the room's decor. At 40 square meters (431 square feet), it has a king-size bed, a freestanding bathtub alongside a rain shower, and a separate toilet. There are two flatscreen TVs, and somewhere in the room a photograph of the original numbered attic - the one that once held prisoners' belongings - still hangs on the wall.
Suite De Advocaat
The Lawyer's Suite works in black, white, and grey - a reference to the black court robes traditionally worn by advocates. At 35 square meters (377 square feet), it's the most compact of the suites, but has an oversized rain shower and a fireplace fronted by a pair of rocking chairs that make a strong case for staying in rather than going out.
Fitness And Sauna
The gym and sauna are up in what was once the prison's attic - the storage floor where every prisoner's belongings were kept in numbered bags during their stay. Both are accessible to hotel guests. The sauna requires a little notice - about 20 minutes to heat up - but the fitness equipment is available any time.
The Courtyard
What was once the exercise yard - the enclosed outdoor space where prisoners took their mandated daily air - has been redesigned as a Mediterranean-inflected courtyard garden, planted with olive trees and herbs and centered on the sound of a water feature. The hotel calls it The Air Yard.
It connects the bar and the restaurant, and in warmer months functions as the kind of outdoor space that makes a short city stay feel slower than it is. Meals aren't served out here - for those, you go inside to Damianz - but it works well as a place to sit with a drink between one thing and the next, which is more or less what exercise yards were always for.
Pollartstraat 7, 6041 GC Roermond, Netherlands
