The hours between four and seven are the least understood part of the clock. They are not the small hours any more, they are not yet the morning, and the advice that works at two in the morning stops being reliable here. What makes this window distinctive is not the arrangement, which is identical to every other hour, but the fact that it collects two opposite kinds of guest who need opposite things.
The two guests
Almost everyone booking into this window is one of the following, and the whole guide turns on which one you are.
The guest at the end of something. You have not been to bed. The evening ran long, the city emptied, and this booking is the last item in a sequence rather than the first item in one. Your body has been awake for twenty hours or more and is running on the last of it.
The guest at the start of something. You went to bed, you woke at half past three, and you are entirely alert because your body is keeping time on another continent. This is not tiredness that will pass; it is the middle of your own afternoon, and it will hold for hours.
These two want different lengths, different formats and different endings. Saying which one you are in the first message is the single most useful line you can write, because it changes what gets suggested back.
What the window does not change
Everything structural. The fee is the ordinary one, unchanged by the hour: an hour with a single therapist comes to EUR 180, ninety minutes to EUR 270, two hours to EUR 360 and three to EUR 540, with EUR 180 for every hour after the third and EUR 1,250 for a whole night. A second therapist doubles the hourly figure to EUR 360, and so does a second guest; a couple with a therapist each stands at EUR 720 an hour. No dawn rate exists, no night rate exists, and each figure is printed in the profiles on the roster.
Something worth stressing, because guests in this window ask it more than any other group: arriving at an unusual hour does not make you an unusual booking. The roster is built around the fact that some people are awake now. Nobody is being woken, nobody is doing anyone a favour, and no part of the arrangement treats five in the morning as an exception to be accommodated.
The arrival window holds too: forty to sixty minutes from a confirmed booking to a knock, in every central neighbourhood. A booking confirmed at 04:20 means a knock before half past five. The house is outcall only with no premises anywhere, so the journey is hers rather than yours, at this hour as at every other. Schiphol and the airport hotels sit outside that window and are arranged separately, with the journey time agreed before anything is fixed.
What the window genuinely changes
The light
This is the variable that makes four until seven different from two until four, and it moves enormously across the year. In late June the light here starts before five, which means a session beginning at half past four ends in daylight. In December nothing arrives until well past eight, and the same booking is a night booking from start to finish.
Light is the strongest single input to the system that decides when you are awake, so a session that ends in daylight makes sleeping afterwards significantly harder. That is a problem for the first guest and an irrelevance for the second. In summer, if you intend to sleep afterwards, close the curtains properly before she arrives rather than after, and deal with the gap where they meet.
The roster
This is the narrowest stretch of the whole night for choice. Fewer therapists keep five in the morning than keep two, and far fewer than keep eleven in the evening. Flexibility about who comes is worth much more here than flexibility about when, and a message that says so directly gets a faster answer than one that names a single person and waits.
The building
Four in the morning is the emptiest a city building gets. The locks are tightest nearer one, but the corridors are barest here. Night staff, where a building has any, are at the low point of their own shift. Corridors are silent enough that ordinary noise sounds enormous. Entry details therefore matter more here than anywhere: a coded street door or a keycard lift left unmentioned at this hour means someone standing on a pavement in the coldest part of the night. The night entry note covers the four cases.
Advice for the guest at the end of something
Book something that finishes the night rather than extends it. Slow, long, oil-based, with no expectation of being upright afterwards. Ninety minutes is the floor and two hours is better. An hour that starts at half past four and ends at half past five leaves you awake in an odd fragment with nothing on either side of it, which is the least satisfying outcome available in this window.
Then plan the landing. A hot shower afterwards, curtains already closed, the phone turned over, water by the bed, and no alarm if nothing requires one. The temperature swing of a hot shower into a cool dark room is one of the more reliable ways of making a body want to sleep, and at this hour you want every input pointing the same direction. The note on sleeping afterwards goes through the order.
And be realistic about the morning that follows. A session ending at six and a sleep starting at half past does not produce a nine o'clock start. If something at nine is immovable, the honest answer is that the booking should have been three hours earlier and shorter.
Advice for the guest at the start of something
Your arithmetic is completely different and mostly better. You are not borrowing energy, so the usual warning about a collapse an hour after booking does not apply to you. You can book long without regretting it, and an overnight is not an extravagance but the format that actually fits, since an inverted clock has nowhere useful to be at four in the morning.
Time the ending rather than the start. A session that finishes with the light, rather than an hour before it, sets a body up to stay awake into a real morning and is the fastest way to drag an inverted clock towards local time. Two hours from five until seven does that. Three hours from four until seven does it better.
Afterwards, do the opposite of the advice above: open the curtains, get bright light on your face, eat breakfast at breakfast time, and do not go back to bed. The guide for inverted clocks sets out the rest of that plan.
Formats that suit the window
Unhurried things, for both guests. Warm oil work is the natural answer and it is what most of this window books. Sensual work suits it equally. Tantra works well for the second guest in particular, since it rewards a body that is genuinely alert rather than one running on fumes. Anything that finishes briskly suits the window less well than something that finishes quietly.
Each therapist decides what a session includes and says what her limits are before it starts, and those limits hold for the whole visit.
Deposits, unchanged
The ordinary rule applies. Half goes ahead on a first booking, an overnight, two therapists, an airport hotel, a peak date, three hours or more, or anything arranged more than twenty-four hours out. A returning client asking for an hour or two later the same day at a city address pays the whole fee at the door. Note the detail that catches people here: a booking made at four in the morning for that same morning is same-day, so a returning client at a city address sends nothing ahead. The scale for cancellations and moves is set out in full on the booking terms page.
A word about the airport end of the window
Dawn is when requests from the airport hotels cluster, for obvious reasons, and it is the one part of this guide where the standing window does not apply. Schiphol and the hotels around it are arranged individually rather than launched on demand: a start time is agreed with you, the journey time is agreed with you, and half the fee is settled in advance whatever the length of the booking. Nothing outside Amsterdam and those airport hotels is reached at any hour.
The practical consequence is about when you write rather than what you get. An arrangement of that kind wants hours of notice, not minutes, so the message to send is the one written while the evening is still going, or the moment a room is confirmed, rather than the one typed at four with a departure already in view.
Where the window ends
At breakfast, in practice. Once a building starts moving, a corridor is no longer a quiet corridor, and a booking that runs past eight is simply a morning booking with a long history behind it.