A Victorian coaching inn in the Cairngorms, restored by the couple behind Hauser & Wirth, where a Picasso and a Louise Bourgeois spider share a building with tartan, taxidermy and open fires. Forty-six rooms, twelve thousand works of art, and somehow the two registers hold.
The place
The Fife Arms is a Victorian coaching inn in Braemar, in the Cairngorms, bought and restored by Iwan and Manuela Wirth of the gallery Hauser & Wirth and reopened in 2018. The interior is Highland maximalism done seriously: tartan, taxidermy, antiques and open fires, forty-six rooms each individually conceived around a story of the place.
The collection
The Wirths hung a real collection, not decoration. A Picasso, a Lucian Freud, a Gerhard Richter, and a Louise Bourgeois spider in the courtyard, among more than twelve thousand works and objects through the building. It reads as a house that has been collected for a century rather than a hotel that was decorated, which is the whole trick.
The stay
The Clunie Dining Room cooks Highland produce over open fire; Bertie's is the whisky bar, deep on Scotch; the Flying Stag is the pub the village actually uses. A base for the hills, the Dee and the whisky, with more to look at on the walls than most museums. Rooms from around 450 pounds.
At a glance
The TGC view
The Fife Arms is where a serious art collection and a Highland sporting hotel occupy the same building without either giving way. We arrange the rooms, the dining, and the hills, river and whisky around them.
Want us to arrange it?
We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.
Visit website ↗The newest building in this issue by more than a century, standing on the shore of the Alster inside the city. It is also the house that publishes least about itself, and we have written it accordingly.
Read the review →Behind a gate on Kantstrasse that most people walk past, two buildings that used to try women and then hold them. Grüntuch Ernst finished the conversion in 2022. The rooms were cells, and the house neither hides that nor sells it.
Read the review →A walled garden at the foot of Hidari Daimonji, half an hour north of Kyoto Station, with twenty six rooms in it and sixteen UNESCO sites within reach. The point of the house is that it is not among them.
Read the review →