The W Hotel's sixth-floor lounge, with the rooftop pool and a DJ booth above it.
W Lounge sits on the sixth floor of W Amsterdam, the hotel that occupies a converted KAS Bank and former telephone exchange on Spuistraat in the Centrum. The official site calls it "W's reinterpretation of the traditional lobby" — meaning the lounge functions as the hotel's check-in social space by day and a cocktail-and-DJ room by night. The rooftop pool, the 360-degree city view and the indoor-outdoor terrace are the draws. The address (Spuistraat 175), the floor and the bar's operating hours are all verifiable from the W Lounge Amsterdam official site and from The Rooftop Guide's Amsterdam listing.
The right visitor wants an aesthetic cocktail at the top of a luxury hotel, a quick lap of the rooftop, and a DJ set running through their second round. The wrong visitor wants a quiet local snug, a cheap drink, or table service before 19:00 in summer when reservations evaporate. The bar prices and crowd lean Wall Street weekend, not Jordaan brown café.
The lounge is a large indoor glass-walled room with low banquettes, chrome accents and a long bar along the north wall, opening through full-height doors onto the rooftop pool deck. The Rooftop Guide Amsterdam profile describes the space as "complemented with cool terrace balconies, and the outside comes with a beautiful rooftop swimming pool." The DJ booth is positioned at the lounge end so the music carries through to the terrace; in summer the pool deck doubles as the dance floor.
The cocktail programme rotates seasonally; signatures from the W Lounge menu sit in the €16–19 band, with a Smoked Negroni and a clarified-milk punch among the recurring orders. Champagne is the second pillar of the bar — by the glass at €18, by the bottle from around €110. The I Amsterdam listing flags the room as "Amsterdam rooftop cocktail bar for those most interested in what's new and next in the world of mixology," which is the right register: signature-led, presentation-led, not a wine-focused stop.
Skip the wine pours; this is a cocktail and bubbles bar, and the by-the-glass wine list is the weak link in most Google Maps photo reviews. If you want a long sit on the terrace in summer, the spritzes (Aperol, Hugo, St-Germain) at €14 are the value play. The food menu is bar snacks and small plates from the hotel kitchen; treat it as ballast, not a meal.
Early evening the room reads as a hotel lobby: W Amsterdam check-ins with a welcome drink, a few corporate dinners running into the bar. From around 22:00 the resident DJ steps up and the floor shifts to a younger, dressed-up Amsterdam scene crowd — locals on date nights, hotel guests pulled out of their rooms by the music, bachelorette parties on weekends. The official site notes the format directly: "in W Lounge the beat never stops, with nightly resident DJs playing everything from disco to house music."