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."