Afternoon tea with Picasso in the Cairngorms
As the Queen sets off for her annual Balmoral visit, SARAH MARSHALL takes her mum to nearby Braemar for a restorative post-lockdown break
rooms. Scotland only recently emerged from lockdown on July 15, and the hotel is quickly adapting to a new and unfamiliar way of working. Rooms are deep cleaned between guests, breakfast buffets have been ditched in favour of timed sittings, and a one-way system is in place throughout the property.
Otherwise, it all feels refreshingly normal.
Owned by art dealers Iwan and Manuela Wirth (owners of the Hauser & Wirth gallery), who breathed new life into its rundown shell and re-opened in 2018, the Fife is filled with 16,000 artworks, antiques and collectables.
When you’ve been indoors for so long, everything has a new and shiny appeal. But here in this Disneyland of culture and creativity, my mum has the wide-eyed wonder of a child embracing infinity and beyond. Paying homage to Braemar’s Victorian roots, furnishings reflect the grandeur of that time: an ornately carved walnut wood fireplace depicting works by Scottish poet Robert Burns dominates the reception; chairs upholstered in Liberty fabrics decorate the drawing room; and natural history specimens are displayed in curiosity cabinets, or used to create whimsical tableaux in bell jars. Not to everyone’s modern PC tastes, one corridor alone has 100 pieces of taxidermy, upstaged only by an eery waxwork model of Queen Victoria in the library, purchased from Madame Tussaud’s.
If a wall of stags’ heads is divisive, modern artworks incorporating antlers are pleasingly palatable: hanging above the main staircase, Richard Jackson’s Red Deer