What Your Room Needs: Nothing
People tidy. People move furniture. People ask whether they should buy towels or oil. The honest answer is that the room needs nothing at all, and the list below exists only for the curious.
This question arrives in the booking message more often than any other, usually phrased as an apology. Should I clear the table. Do I need towels. Is the room big enough.
No. No. Almost certainly yes.
Everything a session uses arrives in the bag. Oil, towels, a sheet, anything else. Nothing is bought in advance and nothing is expected to be waiting. The room does not get prepared, because preparing it is not your job.
The three things that genuinely matter
Warmth is the first, and it is the only one worth checking. A cold room is unpleasant in a way that no amount of towels fixes. Amsterdam flats in February can take twenty minutes to warm up, so if the heating has been off all day, turn it on when the confirmation arrives rather than when the buzzer goes.
Light is the second. Not much of it, but some. A room lit only by a phone screen is harder to work in than people imagine. One lamp is plenty. Overhead fluorescent is the other extreme and nobody wants it.
Space is the third, and this is where the worrying is usually misplaced. What is useful is a clear strip of floor beside the bed, roughly the width of the bed itself. Not a spare room. Not a cleared living room. A strip. An Amsterdam studio with a bed against one wall has enough, and so does a hotel room, and so does an attic with a sloped ceiling as long as there is standing height on one side.
What not to do
Do not move the bed. It is nailed to a corner for a reason in most Dutch flats, and the arrangement you already have is almost always the workable one.
Do not stack the furniture. A chair by the door is more useful than a chair in a pile.
Do not dim the room to nothing. See above.
Do not put out towels. They will not be the ones used and then you have a pile of laundry that achieved nothing.
The two exceptions
There are formats that involve a bathroom, and they are the only case where the room affects the choice rather than the other way round. Soapy massage wants a bath or a walk-in shower with room to move. Nuru wants a shower afterwards and a floor that can be worked on rather than a soft mattress.
Neither of those requires anything to be bought or set up. They just mean it is worth mentioning what the bathroom is like when you book, because a half-metre shower cubicle and a proper wet room are different rooms and the answer changes.
Everything else on the service list works in an ordinary room with an ordinary bed, which covers most of what gets booked.
The small courtesies, if you want them
A glass of water somewhere in reach. A phone face down. A do-not-disturb sign if you are in a hotel, which is less about privacy than about not having housekeeping try a door at the wrong moment.
That is the entire list, and none of it is required.
Why we are insistent about this
Because the alternative wastes your evening. People spend the arrival window tidying a room that did not need tidying, and then answer the door slightly out of breath having accomplished nothing. Twenty to thirty minutes is enough time to do nothing at all, and doing nothing at all is the correct preparation.
If something about the room genuinely worries you, put it in the booking message and it gets answered before anyone travels. The FAQ covers the ones that come up most. Everything else is a two-line question and a two-line answer, inside the same ten minutes as the confirmation.
Send an address
and an hour.
Two lines are enough: where you are, and when you would like someone there. We answer with a name, an arrival window and a total. If the hour is awkward we say so rather than guess.