The method is borrowed from the galleries this city does so well: a small wall, portraits taken in daylight, the work put in front of the right audience, and the house kept out of the frame.
Body to Body Amsterdam is a roster before it is anything else: fifteen women, each with a page of portraits and a few plain lines about how she works. The house does four things and stops there. It takes your message, it agrees the hour with you, it arranges the visit, and it publishes the rates.
The house keeps no studio and publishes no incall address; the room you are in is the venue. The women live scattered across Amsterdam, Centrum to Zuidas, the Jordaan to De Pijp, so each journey starts close to somewhere, and forty to sixty minutes for the centre is geometry rather than optimism. A guest never has to find an unfamiliar doorway in a strange city, because the only doorway involved is his own. And a session held in your room is held in your conditions: your light, your temperature, your do-not-disturb sign.
The signature session gives the site its name, and it is a genuine discipline: an hour of full-length contact, carried by placed weight and patience, is harder to give well than any photograph suggests. Each woman on the wall builds the version of that hour that is hers, in slow oil work, in foam or in the Japanese gel. Angelika’s session does not feel like Milena’s, and it should not; fifteen interchangeable sessions would make a catalogue, not a gallery.
Every woman on the wall decides for herself which bookings she takes. She may decline one, before or after it reaches her, without giving a reason. The limits of a session are hers to set, and she tells you what they are. She chooses the hours she is available, and she is free to work elsewhere. Ending a visit at any point is also hers to decide. A woman who cannot satisfy herself about a room does not go in, and a room with someone else in it who is not part of the booking does not work for her; mentioning it when you write lets the hour be moved.
Someone on the wall is free at almost any hour, and the rate on her profile reads the same at four in the morning as at four in the afternoon. Some of the women prefer evenings, some like the quieter daytime bookings, and a few are at their best long after midnight. Coverage runs across central Amsterdam and every district inside the ring, and the hotels at Schiphol airport are reached by arrangement, with the journey time agreed before anything is fixed.
Nobody built the present roster to a quota, yet it has turned out wide. Angelika and Violetta are Ukrainian; Hungary gives the wall Bianka, Poland Karolina, the Czech Republic Lea, Romania Liana and Serbia Milena. Cindy is Dutch and Lucie Belgian, Danielle is French, Jasmin German, Nora Danish and Molly Irish, while Laura is Italian and Luna Spanish. Every one of them speaks English, and a guest who would rather start the evening in French, Dutch, Italian or German will usually find a woman who does. Heights run from 165 to 175 centimetres, and each woman has her own page on the roster, with the full set of frames and the sessions she gives.
Temperament varies from frame to frame as much as the languages do. Some of the women talk easily from the first minute and some prefer to let the session do the talking; some are playful and others are serene. None of that fits on a card, so if you are unsure, sketch the evening you are picturing and the reply will say, in a sentence or two, which of the women free at that hour would suit it and why.
A good gallery keeps its collectors' names to itself, and this house treats its guests' names the same way. The booking conversation asks for no surname and no account, only the address, the hour and the length. An address shared for a booking is used for that booking and nothing else. Discretion here is less a promise than a working habit: the fewer details asked for, the fewer there are to look after.
Most evenings begin with a visitor: someone in town for a conference at Zuidas, a long weekend on the canals, or a stopover that stretched into a night. A good number of guests live here and simply prefer their own sofa to somebody else's reception desk. What they share is a liking for things done slowly and done well, and the patience to choose a person rather than a package. Everyone involved is twenty-one or over, guests and women alike, and courtesy is expected in both directions from first message to last goodbye.
If this is your first visit, the kindest order is portraits first and reading second. Look through the frames until one holds your attention, read what body to body means in practice so the session holds no mysteries, glance at the rates table in her profile so the figures hold none either, and then write a single short message. The reply takes it from there.