Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum opening preview With the Stedelijk now opening onto the plaza, and the Rijksmuseum soon to follow suit, already there's more of a buzz about the place, a sense of people crossing from museum to museum, ducking off for a coffee, stopping to book a concert ticket. The Stedelijk's restaurant and café, alongside the new main entrance was, a week or two before the museum officially opened, already packing in the punters, spilling out in late summer sunshine onto Museumplein itself. Inside, the old 19th-century building has been given a blanket white-box treatment. Offices and other utility rooms have been banished to the new wing, to make way for exhibition space. On one side, the ground floor is given over to painting from the 1870s to the 1960s (with some sculpture), and on the other to a wide-ranging display from the applied art and industrial design collections - on permanent show for the first time. A wander through these rooms, before you're too boggled by the finer arts, is a must. Here are treasures for all tastes: a delicate Art Nouveau screen, perhaps, or a Mies van der Rohe chair; an entire, reconstructed Gerrit Rietveld bedroom, or an Ettore Sottsass teapot - all the way through to work by the hottest contemporary Dutch designers, such as Marcel Wanders. The 1870s-1960s art is arranged roughly chronologically. Highlights include Van Gogh's La Berceuse - a portrait of Augustine Roulin, the wife of the postman in Arles, rocking a cradle - and Chagall's The Violinist (one of nine paintings in the collection), together with Picasso's Seated woman with Fish-Hat (one of the 41 works the museum holds), as well as major work by Mondrian and Kandinsky. You can also drop in on the Appelbar, the Stedelijk's original refreshment kiosk, adorned with bright murals by the CoBrA artist Karel Appel. For many, though, the prime attraction is upstairs, on the first floor - the post 1960s art. Here, chronology gives way to arrangement by connecting thematic or conceptual strands, in a series of long-term (but changing) hangings from the permanent collection including La perruche et la sirène, one of Matisse's last works, an enormous paper cut-out done when his eyesight was failing, and a long-standing Stedelijk favourite, Edward Kienholz's The Beanery, a near life-sized walk-in version of his favourite Los Angeles bar, but with all the drinkers having clocks for faces. From the first floor, two walkways lead through into 'the bathtub" (in architect-speak 'an entirely smooth white volume, oblong in shape and canted upward at one end"), which contains changing shows of up-to-the-minute contemporary art, with smaller spaces aplenty for video work, performance art and installations. With its weighty 20th-century collection providing ballast in one part, and a shiny white extension giving space for the new and adventurous, the Stedelijk Museum has at last resumed its place on the world art map. Details The Stedelijk Museum (Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, 31 20 573 2911; stedelijk.nl/en) is open Tuesday and Wednesday 11am - 5pm, Thursday 11am - 10pm, Friday, Saturday and Sunday 10am - 6pm. Admission: 15 adults; 7.50 under 18, under 12 free. Lunch and coffee The Stedelijk has both a café-restaurant, with an independent entrance and terrace on Museumplein, and the smaller Zadelhoff Café, for drinks or a quick bite, inside on the first floor. Conservatorium Hotel (Van Baerlestraat 2, tel. 00 31 20 570 0000; conservatoriumhotel.com) With its eccentrically mismatched sofas and hip clientele, the vast atrium lobby-lounge of the new Conservatorium hotel, across the way from the Stedelijk, makes a great coffee stopover. There's a brasserie, too, which offers an excellent buffet lunch. Café Welling (Jan Willem Brouwerstraat 32, tel. 31 20 662 0155; cafewelling.nl) Open from 4pm weekdays, and from 3pm Saturdays and Sundays.) A traditional Amsterdam 'brown café" (wood-panelled, stained by eons of tobacco smoke), tucked away behind the Concertgebouw, and a favourite with musicians. Other openings and closings The Stedelijk's neighbours on Museumplein are in a similar state of flux. The Rijksmuseum, home to the Nightwatch and other Golden Age masterpieces, has been closed most of this century. An exhibition of highlights remains on view, and the museum resumes full life in April 2013. And a week after the Stedelijk re-opens, the Van Gogh Museum alongside shuts its doors for a refit (a selection of the collection will travel across town to the Hermitage Amsterdam for a few months). So, for the moment, the Stedelijk shines alone.