Scotland's Home of the Year 2025 finalists: 18 amazing photos of the six contenders
The properties vying to be crowned Scotland's Home of the Year 2025 are: 'Sandstone Bungalow' in Giffnock, 'Hilltop House' in Aberdeenshire, 'Wee City Nook' in Edinburgh's Stockbridge area, 'The Tree House' in Broughty Ferry, 'An Cala Cottage' on the Isle of Skye and 'Craigmount' in Dalbeattie.
In the must-see finale, filmed at Glasgow's House for an Art Lover – designed by the iconic architect Charles Rennie MacIntosh – the six finalists come face-to-face, meeting the judges for the first time as well as getting a chance to cast their eyes over each other's homes.
Take a look through our photo gallery to see the six finalists competing to be crowned Scotland's Home of the Year 2025.
The final of Scotland's Home of the Year is on June 2, 8.30-9pm, on BBC One Scotland
1 . Sandstone Bungalow
Home to Pamela and Gordon, their son Caleb and Rosa the Irish Setter, the 'Sandstone Bungalow' blends together old with new, whilst retaining the beautiful original 1930s details. The couple design choices bring the 'Sandstone Bungalow' up-to-date with a bright and modern kitchen, dining and living spaces. | IWC Photo Sales
3 . Sandstone Bungalow
Sandstone Bungalow, Giffnock was the winner in episode 1, West | IWC Photo Sales
4 . Craigmount
A Victorian semi-detached house near Dalbeattie, home to Ozzy, Laura, daughter Grace and Ethel the pug. The property's coastal views won the family over and they made it their own by renovating and adding a tasteful extension to the original granite building. Boasting a bold and colourful interior, the family entered Craigmount as Grace's late gran loved Scotland's Home of the Year. | IWC Photo Sales
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Metro
6 hours ago
- Metro
Resident Evil Requiem hands-on preview - the scariest Resi ever
GameCentral plays 30 minutes of Resident Evil 9, aka Requiem, and comes away not only impressed but gleefully terrified. Despite having invented the term survival horror the majority of Resident Evil games are not all that scary. Most are tense, at least in part, but it's only really Resident Evil 1 (especially the GameCube remake) and Resident Evil 7 that are consistently frightening, and even then they tail off into straight action territory by the end. There are definitely scary moments in Resident Evil 2 and other games but it's perhaps one of the secrets of the franchise's success that you don't have to have nerves of steel to complete them, which could explain why most other horror games usually only sell a fraction of the average Resident Evil game. Apart from one sequence (you'll know it if you've played it), 2021's Resident Evil Village was arguably the least scary entry ever. But along with 2023's Resident Evil 4 remake, which is also in contention for being the least frightening, it was the best-selling in the whole series. So it's very interesting to discover that Requiem is absolutely terrifying. To what degree Requiem is intended to be a soft reboot continues to be unclear. The plan to create a first person trilogy starring Ethan Winters certainly seems to have been cut short, but the first thing you discover with the Requiem demo is that a first person view is still the default way of playing it. While you can switch to third person whenever you want, that requires going into the menu, rather than having a button dedicated to it. The assumption by fans has been that Capcom realised the third person view in the remakes was proving popular – and that a first person view meant people weren't getting attached to the character of Ethan – but that revelation likely only came several years into the development of Requiem. Either way, as soon as you start playing it's very obvious why Requiem is keeping the first person view as the default. At the moment (I'm writing this before Gamescom, so there might be a new trailer during Open Night Live) the story set-up for Requiem is still unclear and despite rumours of Leon and other fan favourites being playable the only one that's been confirmed so far is new character Grace Ashcroft, FBI agent and daughter of obscure Resident Evil Outbreak character Alyssa Ashcroft. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. While at first that seemed like just a random deep cut, Alyssa was also briefly mentioned in Resident Evil 7, in her role as a newspaper reporter, which implies that there has been no major U-turn in terms of Capcom's plans. The inital trailer portrayed Grace as an inexperienced agent, not used to fieldwork, while the demo begins with a scene from that initial reveal, where Grace is hung upside down on a gurney, with a needle in her arm that's extracting her blood. She escapes and finds herself in what is presumably the mysterious Wrenwood Hotel from the trailer. Despite a cut scene showing a doctor attending to Grace there's no one around when she escapes and yet there's a curious detail where the room's light switch works, as does a table lamp, which immediately seems ominous. Exploring the hallway outside, the whole hotel is in darkness, with only a little light seeping through the windows and some evil looking red emergency lights. The graphics are superb, a clear step up from Village and Resident Evil 4, and together with some excellent sound design makes the whole situation immediately terrifying. I wander into a room filled with what seems to be medical supplies but the back of it is pitch black and so I have to retreat and explore the main corridor, which has more locked doors, including an old school Resident Evil one that requires a cherub key . There's a single, overhead light in this area and after retrieving a cigarette lighter I go back to the darkened room to explore, where I find the doctor's very dead body. This is a great jump scare moment and creeping around in the dark, with only a flame to light your way is hugely atmospheric. The doctor's body falls to the floor and suddenly a huge hand grabs it, and a hideous monster lifts it up and bites its head off. Grace has no weapons of any kind, so I run in a blind panic but get confused over the layout and find myself in a dead end from which there is no escape. Trying again is even scarier because I know what's going to happen, but after this time successfully escaping it becomes clear that the monster does not like bright light and immediately retreats from it, breaking into the ceiling above and invoking memories of Alien Isolation. For reasons I was not quite clear on, all the lights in the starting room are now out, so I creep about nervously, ominous sounds all around, and once again try to explore the medical room. This is all the scarier because I don't know what I'm supposed be doing there and while there's a green herb to pick up the moveable trolley doesn't seem to do anything obvious, except allow access to a cupboard… with nothing in it. It makes a lot of noise moving it though, so I retreat and explore further down the hallway, finding a gate blocking the way to a brightly lit foyer. A fuse box nearby is missing a fuse and while I find a replacement I also need a screwdriver. The only option seems to be to go back to the medical room, where I discover that pushing the trolley a bit more allows me to use it to climb up to a cabinet and retrieve a screwdriver. It also involves knocking a TV monitor onto the floor with a loud smash, which doesn't seem to have any immediate consequences but ratchets the tension up further. Inevitably, the monster reappears, right by the only surviving light, and my only option is to lead it into the starting room and run around the central table and out behind it. It's not particularly slow and Grace is not particularly fast, so this is especially harrowing, but I jam the fuse in the fuse box and leap through the gate… only for the monster to grab Grace's leg and drag her back into the dark, to an unknown fate. All of this is fantastically creepy, and I end the demo genuinely frightened. Which is exactly what you want from a horror game. A horror game where you're not horrified is like a comedy where you're not laughing: a failure and usually a pretty miserable waste of time. In terms of gameplay there's nothing complicated going on – and I'm not even sure this is an actual segment from the game, or something created specifically as a demo – but it's surprisingly reminiscent of the first few hours of Resident Evil 7, while also seeming to take fairly obvious influence from Alien Isolation. More Trending There was nothing overtly cheesy or comedic in the game, although you could say the design of the creature is a bit over-the-top, and hard to take seriously in isolation, but it certainly doesn't seem that way when it's chasing you down a dark corridor. Interestingly, it appears to be female, so one obvious guess would be that it's Grace's mother and/or the doctors were intending to turn Grace into a similar creature. Why you'd do an experiment like that in a hotel I have no idea, but I can't wait to find out, because the demo impressed me like no other preview in a long time. Especially as there's still so much that we don't know about the game, since even if the rumours about other characters aren't true the trailer clearly shows a bombed out Racoon City and that was not part of this demo. It's an agreeably long time since there's been a bad Resident Evil game, but Requiem is already off to a fantastic start and could well end up as one of the series' very best. The demo ends with a promise from Capcom that it is merely the 'overture to our darkest symphony' and they don't seem to be lying. Formats: PlayStation 5 (previewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: TBAPublisher: CapcomDeveloper: CapcomRelease Date: 27th February 2026 Age Rating: 18 Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Onimusha: Way Of The Sword hands-on preview – return of the demon samurai MORE: BioShock 4 in trouble as studio lays off staff amid leadership shake-up MORE: Best of Gamescom 2025 trailers – Resident Evil Requiem to Lego Batman
Daily Mirror
6 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Resident Evil Requiem's creepy hospital demo left me anxious and afraid of its horrific new pursuer
After playing a short slice of Resident Evil Requiem for roughly 30 minutes, I'm confident the series' 30th anniversary will shape up being a worthwhile return to Raccoon City. 30 minutes of Resident Evil Requiem gameplay is enough to make me feel good about the new direction the series is going in, with a familiar setting full of all-new types of scares. Grace Ashcroft is having a bad day. When introduced at the start of my 30-minute Resident Evil Requiem demo, she's suspended in the air of an old, creepy hospital, tied up, swinging, and left to fend for herself. Little does she know things are about to get a lot worse. It's a heck of a way to be dropped into to the next entry in Capcom 's modern iteration of first-person Resident Evil games. But then, if there's one thing both Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil Village both excelled at, it's finding circumstances to catch players off guard. This small slice of Resident Evil Requiem I got to play certainly does that. It might have been short, yet as a tease, it's looking like the franchise's creepy tone and intense atmosphere is fully intact for this long-awaited return trip to Raccoon City. It'd be easy to describe the events that play out in my hands-on preview session as 'business as usual'. Were there puzzles? Yes. Key items in need of finding? Of course. A constant sense of dread due to a supernatural danger lurking nearby? You bet. Trying to survive the halls of this hospital as Grace very much plays out like the franchise's bread and butter, then, but not knowing what it all means, how she got here, and when that next respite may come works unbelievably well to see it all add up to an unbelievably tense series of events. The kind of which Capcom has nigh-on perfected in recent years, as evidenced perhaps most recently by Resident Evil: Village's House Beneviento. For now, however, it's all about escaping from this hospital. The first step after freeing myself involves battling the frequent power outages found in most of the building's rooms, which conveniently make it tougher to gauge where each one ends and the next begins. Even still, exploring deep enough leads me to some sort of exit, conveniently locked due to a missing fuse in the adjacent electric box. Classic! From here my demo mainly has me poring through documents to try and learn what potential experiments are occurring at this presumed place of torture, eventually leading me to a key to a door, then a lighter to brighten my exploration efforts, and finally a screwdriver needed to unlock a case to the missing fuse. It was around this point during the demo where, after mistaking an infected corpse for a person in need, I was promptly introduced to one of Resident Evil Requiem's persistent tormentors. Perhaps best described as a cross between the Mother from 2022's Barbarian and an oversized skinless chicken (seriously), this monstrous nurse gets quite the introduction. The first thing I see is her claw, gripping the head of the infected person I was looking at for a cheeky bite. Not satisfied, it's not long before her gaze eventually turns to me, and the eerily creepy game of cat-and-mouse is on. I see you Much like how Resident Evil 2 's Mr. X served as your constant pursuer throughout Raccoon City Police Station, the grotesque woman here is similarly persistent. The difference here, however, is her nature to check under tables and through windows. Her frightful appearance is enough to make me instantly cautious of angering her too much, but my need to light the way through all these endlessly dark halls constantly has me wary of pulling out Grace's lighter too much. With no map to refer back to either, my own chance of making it to the exit alive relies on my wits, and the possibility of distracting her by throwing the odd glass bottle in the hopes of creating a distraction. Except both times I try it doesn't work. The drama of the pursuit culminates when I'm forced to move around and position a cart I need to climb on. It's a sure-fire way of Capcom getting me to make an increased amount of noise, with dishes and bottles collapsing everywhere and forcing me to hide once again. It's here where my only choice is to watch (and be thoroughly creeped out by) the deranged lady's movements, before checking the coast is clear so I can move on. With no combat to speak of, this brief section in Resident Evil Requiem was enough to get my pulse racing, most reminiscent of Resident Evil 7's opening hours where Jack Baker was in quick pursuit and the true challenge was finding my way through the family's labyrinthine Louisiana home. Of course, Capcom has made no secret that one of Requiem's big new additions is thew ability to switch between first- and third-person on the fly. I did this a couple times during this hospital escape demo, and I actually came away pretty surprised with just how effective trying to dodge the monstrous woman's pursuit in third-person still was to set in some scares. Obviously, a big benefit to playing this way is all the extra character animations you get to witness, as Grace stumbles, panics, and clambers her way through the darkened halls. Ultimately, though, during the demo's brief cinematic moments (such as when the pursuer is first introduced) the cutscene still plays out in first-person, indicating to me that this might be the way Capcom intended Resident Evil Requiem to be played – and it's definitely the perspective I much prefer. But still, it's nice to have the option. My demo culminates in one final chase to the finish all the way to that initial exit I discovered early on, where, let's just say Grace doesn't get the result she was hoping for. Brief it may have been, and I'm sure there's plenty more types of scares Requiem has up its sleeve. But for now, as a pure tone piece, Grace Ashcroft's unfruitful visit to Raccoon City's hospital did well to convince me that this return to Resident Evil's iconic location has plenty of spooky surprises in store. Sure, the gameplay loop and survival mechanics don't seem to have changed or opened up too much, yet my main question going in was: 'Nine main entries in, can Resident Evil Requiem still be scary?'. The answer is a resounding yes, particularly if you're brave enough to tackle said scares from the intended first-person view.
Scotsman
11 hours ago
- Scotsman
A heartwarming tale of two families living under one roof
Kate, Allie, and the '86 Mets star Kate Barry on the retro 1980s phone as used in the Fringe show's poster on St Andrew Street, Edinburgh. Picture: Graham Clark During lockdown a guilty pleasure was going to bed listening to Radio 4's Moth Hour. It began on US public radio, solo storytelling to a live audience. Kate Barry's narrative, 'Kate, Allie & the '86 Mets' might easily have made the cut. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Kate's tale opens at their Long Island home where the family, including her recently divorced mother Grace, is watching their underdog New York Mets team win the World Series in 1986. They're joined by Grace's bestie Dorothy, also recently sans-husband, and her young family who've been made homeless by Hurricane Gloria. All the kids get on riotously. The awesome time they all have together leads to summer camps, and Grace and Dorothy's social life blossoms around a local bridge club. The two single moms realise they all get on so well in Long Island that they propose building another storey on the house to live together, to save money. When one of the kids complains there's no pool – the moms agree: they'll build one! Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Life continues idyllically before the pressures of working life force wannabe film maker Kate to spend Friday nights as a helpline worker on the 67th floor of an investment bank. She's in tears and sees a therapist who looks for clues to her feelings in the family setup. When Kate assures the woman it's just like the hit-TV show Kate & Allie – two friends who share a home with their two families for money reasons – the counsellor points out that one of the TV women eventually leaves to set up home with a new man. Kate blinks, and the thought is left hanging. a All through the show I couldn't decide if the story was fiction (authentic family photos and memorabilia are handed round the audience). When the lights came up, Grace stood up smiling in the audience. Or was she?… Barry's deadpan delivery felt ominous and I kept waiting for some catastrophe to hit, but when it comes, the Big Reveal is anything but a catastrophe. Kate, Allie and the '86 Mets is yet another source of joy in a worrying world.
