Scottish hotels have moved on by whiskey and tartan – and the result is infinitely cooler

Squip it tartan and whiskey if you like. In Scotland, the hotels were an affair with brown furniture, weathered black clock and royal stewart padding, creaking floorboards and a lackluster breakfast with naff toast racks and nescafé. By default, golf resorts brought in the successor broses, while Asian and American tourists, who were armed with maps from island distillery, held the majority of the hotel rooms all year round. But there was a radical shift in less than a decade. And it still shifts and attracts a whole new kind of visitors.

Internationally, it is Glenagles that is the most famous luxury hotel in Scotland. It was a century in business last year and always kept its glamor of the 1920s. There were huge setbacks, but it is still a somewhat old school approach for what a luxury hotel should be. It is a serious golf hotel in which customers expect a certain type of style.

Not so elsewhere. I remember that I went to the Fife Arms the year in which it opened in Braemar in 2018. I had been to Inverlochy a few months earlier. The experiences were a world. Inverlochy is great in a way, but is depressed in many others. It feels like a Victorian Luxe version in the 1970s. The Fife arms that I knew immediately on arrival would be a game changer for the whole country. Art farm, the hospitality of the Wild Glamoureous Home and Wirth International Art Galleries Empire, had a new vision about how Victorian architecture can be converted.

It was brave and experimental and like nothing that someone had seen before. The designer Russell Sage and a group of great artists created a fever dream of the Highland. Today it is up there with Naoshima Island in Japan as a place for aesthetic that wants to be stylish. It was a success that Sage is currently in the process of improving the hardware of some of the already excellent suites to the luxury factory. Bookings exceed the goals of the business plan. No matter that it is a 90-minute drive from Dundee, people can’t get enough of it.

In addition to art farm, the Danish wildland company extends the portfolio north of the border. Lundies House was the best and most stylish hotel that I visited last year. This year, Wildland will work to transform the old department store Jenners in Edinburgh into a mega hotel under the design direction of David Chipperfield. At the same time, they are talking about transforming the Dores Inn on Loch Ness into some chic for 2026.

All of these things will be magical when they come into play because Wildland belongs differently Holch Povlsen, a Danish aestheta who loves the Scottish landscape and is also the richest man in the country. This is not a guy who relies on flower budgets in the lobby.

“I am currently ending the work on the Ardbeg House on Islay for LVMH, which will be opened in September with 12 bedrooms,” says Russell Sage. “We created tailor-made furniture, including the wardrobes adapted with graffiti in Gälisch. We worked with many local craftsmen for the design and with Blacksmith Jack Waygood in Edinburgh. It was a knock-out project [and] It’s like nothing else you saw. “Ardbeg would probably still be a success with a reserved approach.

Some Scottish hoteliers have become mod, but it prefers to keep the visual noise low. Gordon Campbell Gray changed the design of the London Hotel scene when he opened an Aldwych in 1998, a year before Ian Schrager’s first opening in the capital. It was cool but grown up. Today Campbell Gray has a little reduced and operates the WEE Hotel Company in Scotland and contains the three chimneys on Skye and the Pierhouse in Argyll.

“As a Scotsman, I can admit that we historically really well and bad, when it came to design, really bad,” he told me. “Fortunately, things have changed. We want to have a feeling from place where we travel in the world, and historically, Scotland has been looking too much the associated traditional designs.

The balance is directly in the Gairnshiel Lodge and its nearby houses, not far from the Fife arms. It was first accepted by a friend on my radar, who asked whether I “had been to the place in the wilderness of Aberdeenshire, who looks like Rick Owens had designed it”. Each of its rooms was required in a different mix of dark colors and in what goes out into this space – the passing river, moss or Heather of the landscape.

There is furniture from Apparat, Charlotte Perriand and Dirk van Sliedrecht. It does the most of what is World of the interior Look like Ikea and it is an indication of the Skandi sensitivity that have influenced so many new places in Scotland. Another reserved, super chic jewel is the Folingall Hotel, which was reopened in Glen Lyon this summer after bought and transformed by interior designer Annabelle Holland. As with the Belgian designer Nathalie van Reeth, who reinterpreted Gairnshiel, Holland had the landscape taken the lead. There is no chintz. The interior is simply in the eye.

The hotel scene in Scottish cities also catches up, but faster in Edinburgh than Glasgow, which really deserves some art farm or wildland love. When the Blythswood Square was opened in 2009, the use of more modern types by Harris Tweed and the architecture of the old Royal Scottish Automobile Club provided something impressive. But today Glasgow has to improve its game. Plans for a Soho house have been put back and it has been too long ago that something really remarkable in one of the funniest cities in Europe was opened. House of Gods opened another Maximalist steam-punk meets-cil B. Demille Hotels last year and gave him 28 bedrooms in the city together with 22 in the capital. Perhaps more hotels will follow for the example and open in both cities.

It seems that the Royal Mile opened a new hotel every week within 20 minutes. There is so much more than the witch business in 2025. A chic New Hoxton, which was opened this summer, and Glenagles Townhouse (a younger, cooler urban sister of the original) still a lot after the opening in 2022. The members of the member feels like a scene on the roof and in the main restaurant in the food hall in the dining hall in the dining hall in the dining hall in the dining hall in an old banner hall in the mealing hall.

While it is a local sport to mock the architecture of the new W -Hotel, it cannot be denied that his interior and the rooms are impressive. And especially if you want to sink into a retro fantasy of Rococo Scottish Glam, there are places that make it better than ever before. Go to Prestonfield House, half an hour outside the city, and you can drown in all the velvet, the Leopard print and the tapestries that you can ever hope for.

Sometimes they want Scandinavian shape and function, sometimes they want to be somewhere like that and opulently wake up that it has forced them to behave badly. And if it was done well, it’s still as cool as somewhere else.

Ardbeg offers rooms from £ 420.