Scottish hotels have moved on from whisky and tartan – and become cool as a result

Telegraph

3 days ago

Blame it on tartan and whisky if you will. For decades, hotels in Scotland were a hum-drum (hum-dram?) affair of brown furniture, weathered Black Watch and Royal Stewart upholstery, creaking floorboards and lacklustre breakfasts with naff toast racks and Nescafé. Golfing resorts brought in the Succession bros by default, while Asian and American tourists armed with maps of island distilleries kept the majority of hotel rooms occupied year-round. But in under a decade there's been a radical shift. And it's still shifting, attracting a whole new kind of visitor.
Internationally, it's Gleneagles that is the best-known luxury hotel in Scotland. It marked a century in business last year and has always retained its 1920s glamour. There have been huge refurbs, but it still represents a somewhat old-school approach to what a luxury hotel should be. It's a serious golfing hotel, where the clientele expects a certain kind of stasis of style.
Not so elsewhere. I remember going to the Fife Arms the year it opened in Braemar in 2018. I'd been to Inverlochy Castle a few months before. The experiences were a world apart. Inverlochy is grand in one way but depressing in many others. It feels like a 1970s version of Victorian luxe. The Fife Arms, I knew instantly on arrival, was going to be a game changer for the whole country. Artfarm, the hospitality offshoot of the wildly glamorous Hauser & Wirth international art galleries empire, had a new vision about how to repurpose Victorian architecture.
It was bold and experimental and like nothing anyone had seen before. Designer Russell Sage, along with a group of major artists, created a fever dream of the Highlands. Today, it's up there with Naoshima Island in Japan as a place for aesthetes who want to be wowed in style. It's been such a success that Sage is currently in the process of upgrading the hardware of some of the already superb suites to up the luxury factory even more. Bookings drastically exceeded the business plan's targets. No matter that it's a minimum 90-minute drive from Dundee, people can't get enough of it.
Alongside Artfarm, the Danish-owned WildLand company has been continuing to expand its portfolio north of the border. Lundies House was the best, most stylish hotel I visited last year. This year, work is underway by WildLand to turn the old Jenners department store in Edinburgh into a mega hotel under the design direction of David Chipperfield. At the same time, there's talk of them turning the Dores Inn on Loch Ness into something chic for 2026.
All these things will be magical when they come to fruition because WildLand is owned by Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish aesthete who loves the Scottish landscape and also happens to be the richest man in the country. This isn't a chap who'll scrimp on flower budgets in the lobby.
'I'm currently finishing work on Ardbeg House on Islay for LVMH, which will open with 12 bedrooms in September,' says Russell Sage. 'We have been creating bespoke furniture for it, including wardrobes customised with graffiti in Gaelic. We worked with lots of local craftspeople on the design, as well as Edinburgh-based blacksmith Jack Waygood. It's been a knock-out project [and] it's like nothing else you've seen.' Ardbeg would still probably be a success with a more low-key approach. But with Sage allowed to run wild, it's going to be one of the most talked-about openings of the year.
Some Scottish hoteliers have gone mod but prefer to keep the visual noise down. Gordon Campbell Gray changed the design pace of the London hotel scene when he opened One Aldwych in 1998, a year before Ian Schrager's first opening in the capital. It was cool but grown-up. Today Campbell Gray has downsized somewhat and runs the Wee Hotel Company in Scotland, incorporating the Three Chimneys on Skye and the Pierhouse in Argyll.
'As a Scot I can admit that, historically, when it came to design, we did good really well and bad really badly,' he tells me. 'Happily, things have changed. We want to have a sense of place wherever we travel in the world and historically Scotland has perhaps leant too heavily on the traditional designs associated with it. I do worry that design can become too much of a statement, but then there is the generic bland design of the major brand hotels. There is a balance to be struck between comfort and excitement.'
The balance is just right at Gairnshiel Lodge and its nearby cottages, not far from the Fife Arms. It was first put on my radar by a friend who asked if I'd been 'to the place in the wilds of Aberdeenshire that looks like Rick Owens designed it'. Each of its rooms has been limewashed in a different blend of dark colours, accenting whatever that room looks out onto – the passing river, moss or heather of the landscape.
There's furniture by Apparatus, Charlotte Perriand and Dirk Van Sliedrecht. It makes most of what's in World of Interiors look like Ikea and it's indicative of the Scandi sensibilities that have influenced so many new places in Scotland. Another low key, super-chic gem is Folingall Hotel that reopened in Glen Lyon this summer, after being bought and transformed by interior designer Annabelle Holland. As with Belgian designer Nathalie Van Reeth who reimagined Gairnshiel, Holland has let the landscape take the lead. There's no chintz. The interior is easy on the eye.
The hotel scene in Scottish cities is also catching up, but faster in Edinburgh than Glasgow, which really deserves some Artfarm or WildLand love. When Blythswood Square opened in 2009, its use of more modern types of Harris Tweed and the architecture of the old Royal Scottish Automobile Club made for something impressive. But today Glasgow needs to up its game. Plans for a Soho House were shelved and it's been too long since something truly remarkable opened in one of the most fun cities in Europe. House of Gods opened another of its maximalist steam punk-meets-Cecil B. Demille hotels here last year, giving it 28 bedrooms in town along with 22 over in the capital. Perhaps more hotels will follow suit and open up in both cities.
It seems like a new hotel opens every week within 20 minutes' walk of the Royal Mile. There is so much more than the Witchery in 2025. A swanky new Hoxton opened this summer and Gleneagles Townhouse (a younger, cooler urban sister of the original) still has a lot of buzz after opening in 2022. Its members bar feels like a scene on the rooftop and the main restaurant in the dining hall is as glam as anything else carved out of an old banking hall anywhere in the world.
While it's a local sport to mock the architecture of the new W Hotel, there's no denying that its interior and rooms are impressive. And, most importantly, if you do want to sink into a retro fantasia of rococo Scottish glam, there are places doing it better than they ever did before. Go to Prestonfield House, half an hour outside of the city, and you can drown yourself in all the velvet, leopard-print and tapestries you could ever hope for.
Sometimes you want Scandinavian form and function, sometimes you want to wake up hungover somewhere so camp and opulent that it forced you to misbehave. And if it's been done well, that's still as cool as anywhere else.