A Hotel Story: The Fife Arms, Braemar, Scotland

A Hotel Story: The Fife Arms, Braemar, Scotland

The Scottish Highlands meet Hauser & Wirth in the art-filled The Fife Arms hotel, a quirky pastiche of wry Victoriana, local legend and futuristic fiction

This article appears in Volume 27: The Books
Issue



Some

libraries
are grandiose temples, their leather-bound first
editions and soaring shelves whispering classical tales in velvety
tones. Others are more humble, the dog-eared pages and cracked
spines of their contents testament to the many hands and minds
they’ve touched. All, however, are a refuge for stories both real
and imagined – houses for all the minutiae of human experience,
waiting to be decoded, debated and passed on.

And some libraries aren’t libraries at all. This is certainly
the case at The Fife Arms, the much-lauded hotel project from
art-world power couple Iwan and Manuela Wirth. Their gallerist’s
touch is evident; although there are no exhibitions here, the
rather unassuming exterior conceals a nexus of ideas, a bewildering
portmanteau of eras and characters that tip you a sly wink as you
journey from room to room, piecing together the fragments of wry
Victoriana, Scottish legend and futuristic fiction. It is a living
library, an act of imagination seeking to establish new limits for
the Highlands community held dear to its instigators. As the poet
Alec Finlay, one of several collaborators brought on board for the
hotel’s launch, tells me, it is “mapping the past, in the present,
as a way into the future”.



If all this sounds rather heavy-handed, it isn’t – there’s a
healthy dose of humour imbuing every element that means its
intellectualism is easily absorbed. Stepping across the threshold,
I’m greeted by the tinkling of a Steinway piano playing itself, a
gothic-meets-surrealist installation by the contemporary artist
Mark Bradford. Ahead, a cascade of neon-glass antlers swirls around
a pole composed of bagpipe drones in “Red Deer Chandelier”,
commissioned from the LA-based artist
Richard Jackson. One of the bedrooms is dedicated to “Sharp the
Dog”, Queen Victoria’s beloved pet, with a creepy assemblage of
china cats and dogs grinning from every surface; while in the
library, a full-size waxwork of the monarch herself presides over
the bookcases. It’s a knowing pastiche of the weirdness of the
Victorian era from which the hotel takes its cue – buttoned up but
outrageous, obsessed with
Scotland
and India,
each trinket a clue waiting to be read.


Originally opened in 1856 in the wake of a tourism boom
kick-started by Queen Victoria, The Fife Arms had slumped into a
dismal overnight stay for passing coach parties before the Wirths,
interior designer Russell Sage and a chorus of creative voices
revamped it late last year. Much has been written about the hotel’s
art collection of over 14,000 pieces. A Picasso reigns over the
drawing room, a Lucian Freud portrait hangs in the lobby opposite
an antique mantelpiece carved with scenes from the work of poet
Robert Burns, and an original Louise Bourgeois spider crouches in
the courtyard. There are also special commissions from Indian
artist Subodh Gupta, whose chandelier of pots, pans and
carnival-coloured bulbs glimmers over the dining table in The Fire
Room; Chinese artist Zhang Enli, who conjured the kaleidoscopic
mural on the drawing room ceiling, inspired by the cross sections
of Cairngorm crystals and topographic maps; and Argentinian artist
Guillermo Kuitca, whose prehistorically “cubistoid” strokes adorn
the walls of The Clunie Dining Room, where I eat ember-cooked leek,
smoked turbot and langoustine to the soundtrack of the Clunie Water
gushing beneath the windows.


However, the longer I spend here, the more I come to suspect
that such showstoppers are something of a red herring – a way of
drawing your attention to the multiple stories that coexist rather
than compete. Its 46 rooms are named after a plethora of cultural
icons and subjects ranging from the gloriously OTT Royal Suites,
dedicated to figures such as the Duke of Fife and Queen Victoria,
down to the unpretentious Croft Rooms, inspired by traditional
croft houses and with monikers like The Hill and The Mountaineer.
The million-dollar art pieces mingle with portraits of locals by
graduate painter Gideon Summerfield, and the house tartan was
designed by Deeside native Araminta Campbell.

It’s an egalitarian kind of storytelling that manifests in the
hotel’s relationship with the community. The village of Braemar is
best known for the Braemar Gathering, the only outpost of the
Highland Games that the Queen faithfully attends each year –
however, during my stay, which coincides with the Braemar Mountain
Festival, I’m introduced to a host of characters and tales as
quirky and idiosyncratic as the glorious fictions being enacted
within the hotel’s walls. On a village walk I’m shown the cottage
where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote some of Treasure Island (and
where his ghost allegedly pops up from time to time), the
Wes Anderson
-esque Great North of Scotland
Railway
station (which isn’t actually connected to a railway),
and the candy-striped sweetshop once run by Elsa Schiaparelli, the
Italian couturier who was a regular visitor to Braemar and also has
an art-deco cocktail bar named after her in the hotel. We pass a
house where I’m told the owner used to keep a pet monkey, which has
since passed into local legend – the knitting club made it the
theme of its annual competition last year, covering the village
with woollen primates.


However, the longer I spend here, the more I come to suspect
that such showstoppers are something of a red herring – a way of
drawing your attention to the multiple stories that coexist rather
than compete. Its 46 rooms are named after a plethora of cultural
icons and subjects ranging from the gloriously OTT Royal Suites,
dedicated to figures such as the Duke of Fife and Queen Victoria,
down to the unpretentious Croft Rooms, inspired by traditional
croft houses and with monikers like The Hill and The Mountaineer.
The million-dollar art pieces mingle with portraits of locals by
graduate painter Gideon Summerfield, and the house tartan was
designed by Deeside native Araminta Cam3pbell.

It’s an egalitarian kind of storytelling that manifests in the
hotel’s relationship with the community. The village of Braemar is
best known for the Braemar Gathering, the only outpost of the
Highland Games that the Queen faithfully attends each year –
however, during my stay, which coincides with the Braemar Mountain
Festival, I’m introduced to a host of characters and tales as
quirky and idiosyncratic as the glorious fictions being enacted
within the hotel’s walls. On a village walk I’m shown the cottage
where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote some of Treasure Island (and
where his ghost allegedly pops up from time to time), the
Wes Anderson
-esque Great North of Scotland
Railway
station (which isn’t actually connected to a railway),
and the candy-striped sweetshop once run by Elsa Schiaparelli, the
Italian couturier who was a regular visitor to Braemar and also has
an art-deco cocktail bar named after her in the hotel. We pass a
house where I’m told the owner used to keep a pet monkey, which has
since passed into local legend – the knitting club made it the
theme of its annual competition last year, covering the village
with woollen primates.


St Margaret’s Church is in the process of being converted into
an arts and performance space – reportedly partly funded by
donations from the Wirths – and that evening I swing around the
village hall during a ceilidh alongside greying elders, teenagers
in boohoo.com bodycon and a seven-year-old in a matching tartan cap
and kilt. The next morning, I return for a lecture by Finlay about
his project “gathering”, a mapping of place names in the Cairngorms
commissioned by The Fife Arms and inspired by the work of natural
scientist Adam Watson and author Nan Shepherd. In her love letter
to the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain, Shepherd wrote, “To aim for
the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain.”
Finlay’s book takes the same approach, highlighting folk legends
and natural phenomena to explain that the Cairngorms are “a
landscape of conflicting ideas – it’s not just historical, it’s
being debated and imagined”.


I drive up into the indigo hills with local writer and guide Ian
Murray in search of the landscape Finlay describes. We pass shaggy,
ginger-snap Highland cows as we ascend into the sleety skies and
snow-capped mountains, spotting grouse and the odd deer among the
russet-coloured heather. As we break through to the other side of
the mountain, a brilliant-blue sky cracks open the gloom and we
stop on the banks of a navy loch, a postcard- perfect rainbow
stretching from one side to the other. The cold clarity of it is
almost painful and I think of Shepherd’s description of walking
through the hills: “one walks the flesh transparent… flesh is not
annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential
body.”

Before I leave, I bump into Finlay in The Flying Stag, the
bustling village pub
attached to The Fife Arms, which on a Sunday afternoon is packed
with hikers, locals and well-heeled hotel residents. I tell him
I’ve been out in the Cairngorms and he replies, “I can tell –
you’ve got light in your eyes.” And this is how I feel as I depart
this curious, ambitious gem of a hotel – with eyes full of light,
lungs full of air and a head full of stories.

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