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In open-minded Amsterdam, where stolid burghers welcomed the Sixties and ladies of the evening ply their trade alongside tulips and the Night Watch, commerce has long cohabited easily with the avant-garde. Over the past few years, the Dutch blend of enterprise and innovation has galvanized two unlikely neighbourhoods. The Eastern Docklands near Central Station, once a 19th-century cargo port, is becoming a laboratory for contemporary architecture and city living, and De Pijp, an immigrant quarter just south of the central city, is drawing young professionals and the boutiques that love them.

De Pijp

In the 1980s, de Pijp was a rough-around-the-edges home to newcomers from more than 100 countries. At the tail end of the 1960s, when I lived in a studentenhuis nearby, it was known as a place to find cheap ethnic eats, flea market stalls peddling Second World War memorabilia, and a few working girls. ( De Pijp – “the pipe” – is also Dutch slang for the male organ.) Recent construction of a subway line, set to open in 2013, has kick-started development, spurred by a torrent of young financial types seeking reasonably priced real estate in this space-starved city.

“Six years ago, when my friends and I came to Amsterdam to study, this was a rare neighbourhood close to the centre that students could afford,” says 27-year-old Cyril Vink, an information technology industry headhunter and son of a close friend from my student days. De Pijp has got livelier over the past few years, he notes, with bars and restaurants replacing Middle Eastern groceries.

“I've seen property values shoot up nearly 400 per cent in the last few years,” says Vink, who like many of his real-estate-savvy peers has combined several small flats here into a roomy loft.

In the past generation, little seems to have changed at de Pijp's century-old flea market, Albert Cuyp Market, where most of the 300-plus vendors appear to be hawking the same mélange of second-hand dinner jackets, herring and chocolate genitalia as they were in 1969. But now traditional establishments such as De Peperbol, a spice-crammed booth emitting the heady aroma of a Dutch East India Company ship, co-exists with newcomers such as Bazar Amsterdam, a trendy Middle Eastern spot transformed with hand-painted Iranian tiles from an old church into a coolhunter's idea of the Thousand and One Nights .

Nightlife throbs around the central square, Gerard Douplein. Here, tables spilling out of cozy “brown bars” such as Het Paardje – which lacks tobacco-stained walls, thanks to a recent smoking ban – mingle with the overflow from posh establishments such as WynBar. It's a tangle of beer, wine and bonhomie around an eccentric sculpture built from discarded cookie moulds.

Aging aunties are celebrated at the kitschy bakery café De Taart van m'n Tante –My Auntie's Cake – where young style-makers take tea on overstuffed chairs amid a field of fake tulips, flanked by a spun-sugar Elvis wailing on his confectionery guitar, and a freshly baked Superman saving a gumdrop metropolis. Aspiring Hansels and Gretels can stay at a bed and breakfast, Cake Under My Pillow, which is less messy than its name implies.

Still, the old kitchen supply store Duikelman may be the clearest barometer of the neighbourhood's change. Open since 1940, it's crammed with utensils evolved from Holland's lactose- and caffeine-laced cuisine, such as a two-handled cheese knife akin to a miniature whipsaw and a no-fail milk foamer shaped like a fishnet. But these days demand from de Pijp's new house-proud residents has spawned two branches.

The Eastern Docklands

On the other side of Central Station, a futuristic version of Venice is rising on wind-whipped man-made islands abandoned in the 1970s when Amsterdam's cargo port moved out of the city.

While restaurants and boutiques are sprouting on the wharves of several European cities, including Dusseldorf and Hamburg, the socially conscious Dutch saw even grander possibilities including city homes for families, accessible living for seniors and studio space for artists. Along these canals, young parents on bikes with kiddie seats outnumber tattooed hipsters.

This zone is also a playground for young architects – who are ripping neglected factory buildings open to the light and reimagining the Renaissance-era canal house in distressed metals and glass. These repopulated islands are connected by fanciful bridges shaped like arching cobras or a flock of soaring birds, and their wharves are lined with a crazy quilt of houseboats, from sleek pleasure cruisers to gritty work vessels draped with wildflowers.

KNSM-laan, a street once favoured by squatters, now thrives with design stores anchored by the renowned interior design studio Pols Potten, the lighthearted lifestyle store Sissy-Boy Homeland, a multicoloured explosion of children's clothing and games at Keet in Huis, and Arrival/Departure with its fresh take on mid-century fashions – like a vampy Swing Era-style dress from the retro label Stop

Staring.

For fine dining, Jamie Oliver's Fifteen, which like its London sibling takes on at-risk youngsters as apprentices, is flourishing in a warehouse hung with crystal chandeliers. While the white-tablecloth section serves a four-course set menu, the less formal trattoria offers free choice of vibrant dishes sourced from local farms, including rich lamb shoulder ragu with rosemary and palate-twisting desserts such as panna cotta with rhubarb and prosecco-mascarpone ice cream.

An iconic place to spend the night is the Lloyd Hotel, a commanding monument to early Amsterdam School architecture – the Dutch version of art deco. This unorthodox establishment offers one-star bath-in-the-hall accommodations alongside sprawling five-star suites with unusual amenities, such as a grand piano or a bed that sleeps eight.

Yet my ballroom-size five-star room with 25-foot windows had the distinction of being both dramatic and less than comfortable. With its double bed moored in a corner like a foundering ship in the ocean and a loo boasting 1920s atmosphere with amenities to match, this particular accommodation was a bit too redolent of its past lives as a clerk-filled shipping office and a dorm for errant juveniles. Next time, I'll go for a stylish one-star ($160) that bears few traces of its days as a post-Second World War detention centre for Dutch collaborators.

Still, the lure of the Lloyd is less in its billets than in its distinctive clientele, an eclectic mix of European creative types who gather around a communal table for farm-style breakfasts of yeasty baguettes, crackling croissants and homemade cakes before heading upstairs to the hotel's Cultural Embassy, a clubby hotline to Amsterdam's music and art scene.

But which neighbourhood will nurture the next wave of hopefuls arriving with a sketch pad and dream? Amsterdam's intrepid town fathers have started rolling out the welcome mat in the Red Light District, converting former bordellos into studio space for clothing stylists and jewellers with the help of celebrated design firms such as Droog and Moooi.

And after that? As avant-garde boutiques blossom between shop windows displaying more corporeal pleasures, Amsterdam's once iconic smoking coffee shops may look so endearingly antiquated the next generation may feel compelled to launch a preservation movement on their

behalf.

PACK YOUR BAGS

GETTING THERE

KLM and Northwest fly direct from Canadian airports to

Amsterdam.

WHERE TO STAY

LLOYD HOTEL Oostelijke

Handelskade 34; 31 (20) 561-3604; www.lloydhotel.com. One-star rooms from $160; five-star

rooms from $717.

Cake Under My Pillow Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat 66; 31 (20) 751-0936; www.cakeundermypillow.com. From $175.

Where to Eat

De Taart van m'n Tante

Ferdinand Bolstraat 10; 31 (20) 776-4600; www.detaart.com.

Fifteen Amsterdam

Jollemanhof 9; 31 (10) 711-1567; www.fifteen.nl.

Where to Shop

Albert Cuyp Market Mondays through Saturdays along Albert Cuypstraat.

Duikelman Ferdinand Bolstraat 68; 31 (20) 671-2230; www.duikelman.nl.

Sissy-Boy Homeland

KNSM-laan 19; 31 (20) 419-1559; www.sissy-boy.nl.

Arrival / Departure KNSM-laan 301; 31 (20) 419-9234; www.arrivaldeparture.nl.

MORE INFORMATION

Eastern Docklands

www.easterndocklands.com. Amsterdam Centre for

Architecture www.arcam.nl. Offers tour maps of Eastern Docklands.

Special to The Globe and Mail