Shore thing — the Secret Coast holiday home of your dreams

Times

a day ago

Arriving at a faraway (but not too far) holiday house on a Friday night, at the end of another working week, when your children are young and nerves are frayed, is the definition of respite. Especially when that house is a sumptuously restored and mildly eccentric Victorian villa overlooking Argyll's Secret Coast. A canny bit of tourism marketing speak that must be true because in almost 30 years of living in Scotland, I've never come here before.
It's dark when we pitch up in Tighnabruaich, its scattering of houses rising from the shoreline as though they've been hurled into position from across the Kyles of Bute. The late hour means the softly lapping waters are heard more than seen, spotlit here and there by sturdy village lamps studding the shore. But there are advantages to arriving somewhere after night has fallen. The next morning we wake early, and through the vast Victorian bay windows in the sitting room, sit huddled together watching the sun ascend over the Kyles of Bute. Slowly, slowly the quiet beauty of this part of western Scotland reveals itself.
Shorefront House opened in 2021 after a huge restoration. Previously a hotel with a reputation for rowdy ceilidhs and late-night lock-ins, it had lain empty for 15 years, growing increasingly derelict until a Glasgow couple, Graeme and Lorraine McFall, with a background in the music industry saw it, fell in love and snapped it up. In less than three years they transformed this grand old mansion into a five-star holiday house with underfloor heating in the en suite bathrooms, Nespresso coffee machines and a sound system so impressive we fear the neighbours might come round (fear not, they don't). There is a Big Green Egg barbecue, a huge terrace for outdoor dining, a fire pit and pétanque court in the garden, and a pool table in the games room over which my son becomes extremely territorial. The thing that impresses this middle-aged mum most of all? A boiling water tap in the kitchen.
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You could have an incredible multigenerational party here, spilling out onto the lawn, catered by Tide & Thyme, a local restaurant that also does private functions. The eight bedrooms — six are en suite — are named after Graeme and Lorraine's favourite Eighties bands. Which means listening to the children running up and down the stairs screaming, 'I'm in Orange Juice!' 'No, the Waterboys!' 'No, the Proclaimers!' We end up in Deacon Blue.
It's a quirky modern touch, but it's also a nod to Tighnabruaich's deep historic links with Glasgow. Like so many imposing (and often decaying) Victorian mansions, Shorefront House has a long and complicated past, indelibly wrapped up in this country's history of empire. While the house was being built in the 1890s for a member of the Dobie family, who owned a tallow and tobacco company in Paisley, the village around it was expanding into a popular weekend retreat for Glasgow's merchants who were making huge fortunes through the unfettered plunder of tobacco, sugar and cotton in the colonies. Tighnabruaich was still only accessible from the water then so the merchants would come by paddle steamer, a history written in the three ghostly piers jutting from the village's short stretch of shoreline. (The expression 'Getting steaming' is said to come from this era because the paddle steamers, unlike many areas of Glasgow, were licensed.) The scenic, twisting road we drive here wasn't blasted out of the Cowal peninsula's hillside until the 1960s.
Despite the cut-off feeling that accompanies all stays on peninsulas, there's loads to do. Just off the road out of Tighnabruaich you can play a round of golf that you pay for via the honesty box at the clubhouse. There are boat tours and trips 'doon the watter' from Tighnabruaich pier aboard the last seagoing paddle steamer, the Waverley. We head to Ostel Bay beach a few miles' drive from Tighnabruaich, parking at a little farm with an adjoining café, to stroll through dunes to a vast stretch of golden sand with magnificent views across to Arran.
But why go anywhere when you're staying in a house like this? So it's back to the big views from the big windows. The generosity of the kitchen and the sound system. The game of pool with a bottle of local craft ale in the evenings. And the knowledge that we're staying in a carefully preserved piece of history that could so easily have been lost.Chitra Ramaswamy was a guest of Luxury Cottages (luxurycottages.com), which has one night's self-catering for 18 at Shorefront House from £840