THE ART OF ESCAPISM
Hotelier Vanessa Branson is intent on transforming her West Coast redoubt Eilean Shona into a world-class destination
Art dealer and hotelier Vanessa Branson’s family has form when it comes to turning islands into luxury hideaways, and with Scotland in her bones she is intent on transforming the remote and magical West Coast redoubt of Eilean Shona into one of the world’s premier destinations, she tells
There are people who lack sentimentality, and then at the far end of the spectrum there’s Vanessa Branson’s formidable mother, Eve. When her father died, only a call from a horrified housekeeper prevented her mother destroying a lifetime’s worth of photos, letters and personal effects. ‘I got there just in time,’ said Branson. ‘Mum had asked the housekeeper to put them in the fire.’
It was one of those moments whose significance only becomes truly apparent with hindsight. Looking through those photos, Branson pieced together a history that she had known little about. ‘My father wasn’t nostalgic,’ she said. ‘The family always looked forward, so when dad died my mum was going to throw all of these photograph albums away, and it was her housekeeper who saved them for me after Mum asked her to put them in the fire. ‘It was then that I saw these beautiful photographs of Spean Bridge. With a cousin, who was much older than me, we pieced it all together and it just added up. All of my father’s old fishing rods came from that house, for instance. It was a fascinating journey of discovery.’
The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle quickly fell into place, and revealed a remarkable tale. Branson’s great-grandfather was a penniless Highland gardener whose wife had died, but whose employer, the celebrated but unmarried Dr Bailey, took a shine to his youngest son, James. In return for allowing James to become his ward and take his surname, in his will the good doctor left James £18,000, enough to set himself up as a gentleman by building Invergloy House on the banks of Loch Lochy, landing a society wife and raising four children in considerable comfort.
Branson’s father had told her snippets – of how the house was
so remote that they ran the flag up the flagpole so the postie knew if they were in or out and didn’t have to come all the way up to the house; of how the tailor would cycle 14 miles from Fort William to do fittings – but she now finally understood how her father had sufficient money to privately educate his four children.
But the treasure trove of photos taken by her granny Joyce, which documented an idyllic Edwardian life of fly-fishing, grouse shooting and deer stalking for the boys, and governesses for the girls, was completely new.
‘What I found really comforting was the continuity in life,’ she said.
‘I love looking at the photographs of my grandmother’s childhood, and the clinker-built boats on the loch and all the simple things that you do in the country – walking, making dens. Thankfully my grandmother’s passion was photography; she was happiest when viewing the world through a camera lens. She and her sister Dora spent many happy days together at Invergloy, Joyce with her camera and butterfly net, Dora with her sketchbook and watercolour paints.’
That Caledonian connection runs deep – her other grandmother, with whom she spent a lot of time, ‘was a remarkable woman whose Scottishness was very much part of her identity’ – and was to resurface in a totally unexpected way later in life. Yet for much of her life, that heritage barely impinged upon her consciousness, except for the occasional journeys northwards.
These included crystal clear memories of being at her painfully frail grandmother’s bedside in her last hours; of trying to work out how to dispose of lukewarm tongue sandwiches while being watched like a hawk by her Uncle Ron’s maid at their Spean Bridge house.
But mainly Branson was content with her glitzy life in London, where she led a gilded existence at the cutting edge of the contemporary art world, consorting with the
‘I love looking at the photos of my grandmother’s childhood – clinker-built boats on the loch, walking and making dens’
rich (her older brother Richard and his Necker Island crew) and famous (her bedspread is embroidered with a poem Tracey Emin wrote for her in the early hours at a Soho watering hole). From her art gallery on Portobello Road she founded the Portobello Arts Festival, and from the Moroccan riad she purchased and turned into one of the world’s best hotels she launched the Marrakech Biennale which went on to become a runaway success.
At that stage in life she barely spared a thought for Scotland, even if it still occupied headspace. She and her then husband Robert Devereux would visit friends in Scotland, but it was a fleeting kiss rather than a full-blown love affair.
That all changed in 1995 when she and Robert were en route to visit their friends, Charlotte and Rupert de Klee, on Mull, and Robert suggested taking a huge detour by catching the Motorail to Inverness. By the time an apoplectic and heavily pregnant Branson understood that the diversion was so they could look at a remote West Coast island that Robert wanted to buy, the die was cast.
Yet as they drove from Inverness, her mood changed. A golden eagle flew low across a loch and the hills enveloped them. By the time they reached the slipway at Dorlin, with the romantic ruin of Castle Tioram on one side and Highland cows chewing at wildflowers on the mudflats on the other, life had taken on a different, more peaceful, hue.
She still insists that buying Eilean Shona, a 2,000-acre island on Loch Moidart, was ‘an act of utter lunacy’, yet they were smitten. In 1924 JM Barrie had been equally bewitched by the magic of the place, staying there while he wrote the screenplay for Peter Pan, and its new owners understood completely, rechristening it Neverland.
Her fourth child, Ivo, was born the day after the purchase went through in 1995 and despite never wanting the extra responsibility that comes with the stewardship of an island it has been a constant in her family life. They recreated the outdoor life that she recognised in her grandmother’s photos from Invergloy, with her kids and their friends running wild.
‘The things my grandmother did are exactly the same as the things that we’ve done with my kids on Eilean Shona, where very little changes,’ she says. ‘The unadulterated pleasure that Scotland offers is to go outdoors, the way you can have four seasons in a day, the quality of the food, and the genuineness of the Scots.
‘I firmly believe that the landscape does dictate the personality of the people up on the West Coast and there’s that steady Highland strength which I just love.
‘We definitely embrace that side of our personality – swimming in the cold water, thinking nothing of going for a hike over hill and glen. The kids got involved in the local Fèis Nan Garbh [music and cultural festival] and took part in the raft-race in Acharacle. I love that sort of holiday and it’s certainly an antidote to metropolitan London.’
Despite the fact that Eilean Shona was ‘Rob’s passion’, when Branson and her husband split it was she who held tight to Eilean Shona, buying her husband out of their impulse buy eight years ago. Since then it has been a steep learning curve that
included ‘everything there is to know about rhododendron eradication, keeping deer down, about tree diseases and hurricanes and weather systems and tides’, yet she has also changed the way the island is being run.
When her husband ran the island, the nine-bedroomed Eilean Shona House and its eight cottages were let out via an agency. But since taking over, the island has drawn Branson in and big changes are afoot. As someone who has made a huge success of her celebrated hotel El Fenn in Morocco, she believes she knows about the art of escapism and has taken all the properties back in hand. But unlike a hotel, where people come to a constructed reality designed for
JM Barrie was bewitched by the island, staying here in 1924 when writing the screenplay for Peter Pan’
holidaymakers, Eilean Shona is a way of life whose essence she has tried to preserve.
‘It is naturally the most beautiful place, and thanks to Covid I think people now appreciate that they and their kids thrive in a natural environment without shops or any of the white noise of the outside world.
‘With Eilean Shona we’re in this blissful sweet spot and we haven’t made the mistake of putting in hot tubs and anything plastic; in fact we’re getting away from anything like that so there are no signposts or uplit trees. We’ve kept it really natural and are celebrating our strengths, which are the wilderness, but luxury wilderness.’
If she sounds like a convert, then in some ways she is. Struggling to finish her first book, the wonderfully readable One Hundred Summers, she came up to Eilean Shona for peace and quiet over the winter and instead found the same inspiration that
enthused Barrie almost a century ago.
‘When you’re creating a space for people to go on holiday – especially with hotels – you’re just creating beautiful spaces for people to drink in. But on Shona you’re also creating spaces for people to be creative in. It’s a simple formula, and if you can get that right you will make people very happy there.
‘Being on an island transforms your experience into something almost mystical – as soon as you step foot on the dock you become something different and everybody feels like that. You’re a sealed group and you have so much time there, so my feelings on Eilean Shona are more heightened than normal places, and that’s never failed me. I’ve had some very happy times there.’
Branson is not the sort of person to do things by half, and having experienced an epiphany she is throwing herself into changing the island forever. In the quiet winter months she is focusing on cultural events and writers-in-residence (including herself, she intends to base herself in the off-season to write her second book). And after many years subsidising Eilean Shona she also plans to make hay in the prime summer months, undertaking a root and branch overhaul and selling her London home so that she can afford to ‘make Eilean Shona one of the most desirable islands in the world’.
‘I’ve now invested a proper amount of money on the island and am no longer tinkering around the edges; when I restore something I do it from top to bottom and do it well,’ she said. ‘I’ve sold my London house and am investing that money into Scotland, so I’m serious about it. I know I won’t regret it, and the island deserves it.’
Yet although the island is a business second, it remains a family venture first. ‘It’s a real family hub for us,’ she says. ‘We now get the whole extended Branson family clan to come up every other year. The last time they all came up, the next generation – including all the little babies – spent the week kayaking, paddleboarding, swimming and taking the boat around to the little island in the north channel.
‘We hit a pinnacle of joy after our first glass of Chablis while my nephew played the guitar and the babies danced around on a deserted white beach. I just thought life can’t get any better than this. It’s amazing.’