The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Back to my roots for a Highland fling
Fiona Duncan explores her Scottish side on a trip to Braemar and the stylish Fife Arms
Though I’m a Londoner born and bred, I’m also half Scottish and dead proud of it. My mother spent her childhood summers in Comrie, Perthshire, where her grandfather was the formidable Wee Free minister. The great trick for the bored children in the congregation was to try and make their pan drops last longer in their mouths than his interminable sermon.
Our clan is Drummond. As children we had Drummond kilts, but I have failed to connect with my tartan since; time to put that right so that I can give my little granddaughter Olive her own. So off to the Highlands I went (in simpler times) with my friend Geraldine. She’s a Sassenach, poor thing, so she doesn’t have a tartan. No matter – as a guest of the Fife Arms in Braemar she can have a bespoke one created for her.
The Fife Arms, dominating the diminutive but famous Royal Deeside village of Braemar, is as glorious as I had been lead to believe. Opened in December 2018 by Prince Charles after a three-year makeover, it’s a deeply satisfying, constantly engaging meld of tradition, whimsy and great art courtesy of its owners, international gallerists Iwan Hauser and Manuela Wirth, and its designer, Russell Sage.
From Breughel to Freud and from Queen Victoria (pencil and watercolour of a stag shot by John Brown) to Martin Creed, plus a great deal of taxidermy, some of it rather creepy, the 16,000 pieces of art form a dense, tapestry-like backdrop in every room and corridor.
One can sometimes feel a tad choked by the eccentric, eclectic style of Russell Sage, laden with details, patterns, antiques and memorabilia, but here it works a treat. The dining room feels like a stage, dramatically enveloped in walls decorated in “cubistoid” style by Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca that evoke the rocks and the rushing Clunie outside, while the drawing room is graced by a late Picasso and by an entrancing ceiling mural by Chinese artist Zhang Enli, who took inspiration from cross sections of Scottish agates.
The walls of the drawing room are clad in a soothing tartan fabric, its predominantly green hues both reflecting the natural colours of the surrounding Cairngorms landscape and blending with the mural above. Textile designer Araminta Campbell created the tartan, as well as a tweed, especially for the Fife Arms; you can see them on walls, windows, floors and staff (as uniforms).
So now the hotel has its own tartan, and, courtesy of Araminta and her involvement with the hotel, so can guests too.
The process had begun a couple of weeks before our trip north. Geraldine and Araminta had spoken on Zoom, Geraldine giving information about favourite colours, her most important number and her family background (naval).
During three glorious days at the Fife Arms, we had whisky with our porridge and kippers for breakfast, picnics on the hillsides, walks along the Dee, wonderful wood-fired dinners in the Clunie Dining Room and Sunday lunch in the bar with its winged stag by artist James Prosek flying above, not forgetting cocktails in Elsa’s, the lovely change-of-pace Art Deco room that immortalises Braemar visitor Elsa Schiaparelli, with photographs of her by Man Ray on the walls.
After three days, we were back in Larry’s taxi (he had brought us to the hotel from Aberdeen). Many locals, both craftsmen and hotel staff, are involved with the Fife Arms, which give it its proper Scottish character. If you think it’s a plaything of the super rich, and a construct, you are only minimally right.
Larry transported us to Araminta’s weaving studio in Edinburgh, where her own Minta Collection designs, including throws, shawls, cushions and scarves, are on sale by private appointment (she also offers virtual shopping and design experiences). Her two beloved handmade looms could grace the Fife Arms as works of art; she bought the first, a peg dobby loom by George Wood when she was just 23, having studied embroidery and fine art textiles at university, as had her head weaver, Corinne Thompson. It’s inspiring to see elegant, intelligent young women practicing traditional handcrafts and making them relevant for today, taking inspiration from the natural world, in which Araminta, brought up on Deeside, has immersed herself since childhood.
And it was fascinating to see Geraldine’s tartan come into existence, with Araminta making a series of subtle computer adjustments to her proposed thread colour and pattern until we all exclaimed “that’s it!” And there it was: Geraldine’s very own tartan, which will be logged at the Scottish Registry of Tartans. It won’t be long before she’s stepping out in her new Onslow tartan coat and sitting on her Onslow tartan upholstered dining chairs.
Araminta’s studio is in Leith, Edinburgh’s waterfront, and overlooks a gleaming, handsome ship, Fingal, built in 1963 to supply and maintain Scotland’s far-flung lighthouses. A multi-million pound refit has turned her into an intimate floating hotel, executed with imaginative attention to detail, not least
the sloping floors that give the amusing feeling of being at sea as one walks around. The portholes remain, original chairs have been reproduced, log books retained and the engine room preserved, open to view from a glass walkway, while a cleverly lit circular lift, surrounded by spiral stairs, has the distinct appearance of a lighthouse.
The 23 cabins are sleek and comfortable. Their beds are decorated with wool cushions and throws designed by – who else – Araminta. Like Sage, she loves to weave stories into her patterns and in her plaid design for Fingal you can detect a lighthouse whose thin yellow beam pierces the darkening sky.
What a trip. A fine city, a glorious unchanged landscape, two one-off hotels and a bespoke tartan later, we fly home from Edinburgh. It’s the soft Scottish colours I remember the most: of the hills, the heathers, the rocks and burns, all beautifully reproduced in the interiors of the Fife Arms, including its tartans and its tweeds. I felt I belonged there, which in a tiny sense, I do.
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