Forget the golf ...Gleneagles is getting naughty
Cocktail kits in the bedrooms. Cashmere wallpaper in the bars. And Instagram It-girls at the shooting school. How the hotel they call the ‘playground of the gods’ is getting a VERY sexy makeover
I’VE BEEN in the Gleneagles Hotel’s new American Bar all of two minutes when the barman, Ross, suggests I stroke the wall. ‘Go on,’ he says with a seductive smile. ‘It’s cashmere.’
It really is too, or cashmere wallpaper at least, soft as a baby’s bottom and ridiculously, eyepoppingly luxurious. Then again, that does rather seem to be the theme around here.
The American Bar, which is part of the famous Perthshire resort’s recent multi-million pound refurbishment, is the very peak of sophisticated, blow-the-bank-on-it glamour.
There is a strict dress code (‘informal clothing of any kind’, declares the website, ‘would be inappropriate for the elegant setting’), a low-lit bar that screams 1920s and if you fancy a £25 Champagne cocktail a waiter will wheel a silver cart to your table and make it in front of you.
Even Ross, with his slicked back hair and pristine white dinner jacket, looks like he stepped off the set of the Great Gatsby as he mixes me a Henry Hall, an intoxicating 1920s cocktail involving oodles of gin and an egg white.
It’s the sort of place Coco Chanel might have patronised, sipping a Colony Fizz in a dark corner whilst flirting outrageously with her lover the Duke of Westminster and sketching plans for her latest handbag on a cocktail napkin.
And to be honest, it’s all a bit, well, sexy. Turns out that’s exactly the point.
‘We want our guests to be a little bit naughty when they come here,’ explains Conor O’Leary, Gleneagles’ genial new hotel manager, who arrived last year from the Grand Hyatt in Dubai.
WE WANT to let people use Gleneagles for what it was designed for, a glorious playground to enjoy yourself, have fun, be a bit decadent, treat yourself.’
A glorious playground? Ooh-er. Whatever happened to all the Argyle jumpers and the golf?
It is just over two years since the drinks giant Diageo, which owned Gleneagles for more than 30 years, sold the hotel to 34-year-old Indian born entrepreneur Sharan Pasricha for a rumoured £150million.
The purchase caused ripples across the industry. At the time Pasricha and his development firm Ennismore were best known for running two hipster hotels in London which boasted rooms with jaunty names such as ‘salt beef and mustard’ and ‘fresh fruity number’ and having what it boldly termed a ‘no bull **** policy’.
For a place like Gleneagles, a beacon of well-heeled, old school respectability, it was as if that loud woman from Geordie Shore had suddenly been put in charge of Harvey Nichols.
Yet two years on Gleneagles is transformed. Not in a gaudy, ‘make it look like a nightclub’ way, but in an understated, elegant, ‘I could imagine the Astors coming to stay’ sort of way.
There is the American bar, all cocktails and grown up glamour, a French bistro serving escargot and steak frites, a craft beer pub, a dedicated afternoon tea spot once the meeting room for the G8, and glossy advertising featuring impossibly attractive models in tweeds and posh wellies gambolling around this ‘glorious playground’ (they mention this a lot).
‘From a design perspective it didn’t feel like it had been looked after or invested in much for years,’ Charlie North, Ennismore’s design director tells me. ‘We were hoping to inject some life into it and bring back this concept of making it a playground, and bring back some of the original character of the building. It felt a bit dated. We wanted to go back to the roots of what Gleneagles should be.’
Certainly, when the hotel first opened in 1924 – an event of such magnitude that it was broadcast live on BBC Radio and attracted flapper girls, sportsmen and half the aristocracy – newspapers declared it ‘A Riviera in the Highlands’, ‘The Eighth wonder of the World’ and ‘the Playground of the Gods’. Now that glamour has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Even the stationery, along with the lining of the coats of the linkmen (the dapper chaps who greet you on arrival) has been designed by Timorous Beasties, the hip Glasgow design studio whose distinctive prints have dazzled the likes of Kate Bush, Fortnum and Mason and even Nike.
THE Century Bar – it used to be known simply as the bar – has been revamped so that stags heads mingle with understated tartan and marble and the cocktail menu offers something called the Smoking Gun, a drink made with gunpowder from the estate which is laid out and set ablaze at the table before the glass is cupped over it to give the drink a distinctive smoky flavour.
The place even has its own scent, as if someone were walking ten paces ahead of you wafting some deliciously expensive perfume around.
Up in my room, all tasteful greys, muted greens and a free-standing clawfoot bath, sits a complimentary small swing-top bottle of ‘Gleneagles gin’, a bottle of FeverTree tonic and a bottle of Perthshire raspberry liqueur.
A discreet card meanwhile, invites me to share my ‘experiences’ online using the hashtag #loveglen.
Because make no mistake: this is Gleneagles for the Instagram generation, with everything from the picture perfect cocktails to the
art deco lamps designed to be excitedly shared on social media.
So keen is the hotel to boost its social media status it recently hosted a gaggle of bright young things including model and socialite Lady Violet Manners, fashion lifestyle blogger Kelly Eastwood, model Sarah Macklin, fashionista Rosanna Falconer, and actress Olivia Grant for what it called its ‘Season Opener’, all of whom obligingly posted dreamy snaps of their stay on the photo sharing site.
Then there was the ‘Bucket List Family’, a photogenic American family of four with more than 430,000 followers on Instagram who travel the world documenting their journey in teeth-achingly sugary posts, whose trip to the hotel even warranted an article in its very own newspaper, the Gleneagle.
As I make my way through the perfectly manicured grounds to the falconry school for a lesson with Luna the Harris hawk, I start to wonder if the sport that made Gleneagles famous in the first place even gets a look in.
‘If people come for a few days we’d like them to get up to a few things you’ve never done before, things like riding fishing, falconry,’ says O’Leary. ‘We also have golf courses.’
Ah yes, the golf! Well, someone had to mention it.
‘I suppose Gleneagles had let itself become known for golf,’ muses O’Leary. ‘The numbers never backed that up though. Only 20 per cent of people coming here play golf.’
AND so while the hotel’s Kings Course remains as pristine and immaculate as ever, the golfing element of Gleneagles is being studiously downplayed.
For a place that is the original home of the Ryder Cup (although the Cup itself was first contested in Massachussetts in 1927, the hotel’s Kings Course hosted the first head-to-head team competition between the US and Britain in 1921, three years before the hotel itself opened), it is a calculated risk.
Indeed, the hotel last hosted the Ryder Cup in 2014 and its courses remain a perennial on golfers’ bucket lists worldwide.
But there are certainly plenty of other things to do.
As well as my falconry lesson I spend time with gundogs, all more obedient than the average six-yearold, and take a spin around the grounds where there will shortly be an upmarket beauty salon offering a range of treatments.
It will have its own distinctive brand – an idea that sounds similar to Cowshed, the wildly successful beauty range borne out of the Cowshed Spa at celebrity haunt Babbington House in Somerset.
A few areas of the hotel remain untouched. Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles, Scotland’s only two Michelin star restaurant, remains as it was, while the Strathearn, the most formal restaurant featuring silver service and a slap up Sunday lunch, has not been refurbished. Most of the rooms however have been, as has the front lobby and the long winding corridors.
bUT what about the guests? There’s certainly a cosmopolitan collection of individuals in evidence when I visit – from the grand old dames taking afternoon tea to the slick young hipsters sipping designer cocktail.
There are the golfers, recognisable by their caps and ruddy complexions, the Americans, lustily eyeing up the extensive malt collection, and the locals, those from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Perth who’ve just popped in to see what they’ve done with the place.
‘Around 60 per cent of our guests are return visitors,’ says O’Leary. ‘We have guests that have been coming here for 50 years. People have an emotional connection to the hotel. There’s a certain responsibility that goes with that.’
More plans are afoot. A fine food range, Gleneagles & Co, will be launched in autumn, and then there is the ‘glamping’ complex, a sort of Soho Farmhouse style site awaiting planning approval.
Soho Farmhouse, for those not in the know, is an offshoot of hip London private member’s club Soho House, and has taken luxury ‘camping’ to a new level.
Attracting celebrities such as the Beckhams, Prince Harry and his girlfriend Meghan Markle and Kate Moss, guests are ferried on to the site on a 1950s style milk float, offered their own ‘farmhand’ (read ‘butler’), cabins and even a cocktail truck that chugs around the complex dispensing cocktails at your cabin door. Could we see something similar in Perthshire?
‘It’s still evolving but it’ll be along the lines of “if Gleneagles did camping, what would it look like?”,’ says O’Leary.
Not, one assumes, like a Butlins holiday camp. No indeed. Apparently it will be all ‘luxury tents, log cabins, a country pub, open fires, barns, fishing lakes, a natural spa experience, very rustic rural living but with fun and a bit of naughtiness again.’ Phew.
There is also talk of some sort of private members’ club (there’s that grown up sexy feel again), although initial ideas around expanding the Gleneagles brand to other countries with a chain of Gleneagles resorts around the world in places like Asia and America appear to have been shelved.
‘There is,’ points out O’Leary, ‘only one Gleneagles.’
One way or another, it all sounds like it might cost a lot. But money doesn’t seem to be a problem for Ennismore, which was recently ranked tenth in a list of Britain’s fastest growing companies.
It is perhaps worth noting Pasricha, who comes from a moneyed Indian family, counts the Indian billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, as his father in law.
When it comes to Gleneagles Pasricha is, says O’Leary, ‘heavily involved, in the most positive way.’
‘He cares deeply about the hotel,’ he says. ‘You can’t help but get personally attached and he has that attachment.’
It’s true. By the time my breakfast of porridge and green figs arrives on a tray at my room the next morning – welcome sustenance after those cocktails the previous evening – and I slide into the freestanding bath for a few final scented moments, I am deeply attached, and already wondering if I can mortgage the house for a return visit.
Talk about a little bit naughty.