The Canal Ring, Amsterdam · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone comes to the canal ring to photograph the narrowest house in the world, and almost everyone photographs the wrong thing. The address they queue for is Singel 7, a sliver of a facade barely a metre across, and it does look impossibly thin. The catch is that it is not really a house at all, just the back end of an ordinary one whose proper front door sits comfortably wide around the corner. It became famous by accident and has been quietly fooling visitors ever since. The house that actually holds the record is a modest little thing at Oude Hoogstraat 22, all of 2.02 metres across and five metres deep, now home to what may be the tiniest tea shop in the city. Both are children of the same seventeenth century tax, when Amsterdam charged you by the width of your canal frontage, so the clever and the thrifty built mean little fronts and long deep bodies, hiding whole rooms behind a narrow face. The entire ring of grand merchant houses is really an act of tax avoidance dressed up in gables, and the most photographed house of the lot is a beautiful sleight of hand.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.