From Hotel Bar to Landmark Café
Café Schiller stands on Rembrandtplein, next to the hotel that gave it its name. The hotel was the project of Frits Schiller, together with his brother Hein and sister Elsa, and opened on 6 August 1913. Frits, who was also a painter and portraitist of well-known Amsterdammers, ran the hotel and its restaurant as a single family enterprise from the start. The café itself came slightly later, opening around 1921 and 1922 as the hotel's own bar in the adjoining building.
In the interwar years the bar became a meeting point for artists, writers and performers active in Amsterdam, part of a wider pattern of Rembrandtplein venues that drew the city's theatrical and literary circles. For a clientele that included performers from the square's cabaret and theatre scene, the café was also known as an unusually welcoming space at a time when few Amsterdam venues offered that openness. The café stayed in business through the difficult years of the Second World War, and continued under the Schiller family until Frits Schiller's death in 1971, when it closed. It reopened in 1977 and, in 2000, became formally independent of the hotel next door, though the two still share the same building and address.
An Art Deco Interior
The café's distinctive appearance dates mainly to a 1933 redesign, credited to the architect M.J.E. Lippits working with Frits Schiller. This is when the interior took on the Art Deco character that defines it today: geometric detailing, warm wood panelling and period lighting fixtures applied throughout the room. The redesign came a decade after the bar first opened, replacing whatever simpler fittings it had carried through the 1920s with the more deliberate scheme still visible now.
The most striking single element is a stained-glass mosaic completed in 1948 by the artist Joop Sjollema, depicting figures from musical theatre. Positioned centrally in the café, it has become the room's visual anchor, tying the postwar addition to the 1933 scheme around it. Its subject matter, performers on stage, keeps the theatrical associations of the square present in the room itself, decades after the venues that inspired it have changed. Original paintings and period fittings elsewhere in the café add to an interior that has been kept largely as it was rather than substantially modernised.
Café Schiller Today
The café still operates as a working bar and restaurant, serving breakfast, lunch and evening drinks in the same Art Deco room. Its position on Rembrandtplein, one of Amsterdam's busiest squares, puts it at the centre of the city's nightlife, but the interior itself offers a marked contrast: a quieter, more formal room that has changed relatively little since the 1930s, and that continues to trade on the same combination of hospitality and design that defined it under the Schiller family a century ago.