About this retreat
Braemar sits deep in the Cairngorms, a short drive from Balmoral, and The Fife Arms has anchored its main street since the Victorian era as a coaching inn for sportsmen and royal guests. When gallerists Iwan and Manuela Wirth bought it in 2014, they spent five years turning it into something no other Highland hotel resembles — a working village inn that doubles as a remarkable private collection.
Thousands of pieces are woven into the fabric of the place: antiques, commissioned works, a Guillermo Kuitca mural in the dining room, a Lucian Freud, a pair of Picassos. Every one of the bedrooms is individually themed around Scottish nature, poetry or history, and the effect is maximalist rather than museum-like — thistle wallpaper, stags' heads, crushed velvet and a fire always going somewhere.
The Clunie Dining Room cooks over wood with Scottish produce, while Elsa's — named for Elsa Schiaparelli, who summered in Braemar — is a jewel-box cocktail bar of surrealist prints and a disco ball. The Flying Stag downstairs stays resolutely a village pub. Outside the door: Royal Deeside, Lochnagar, red deer and some of the best walking in Britain.
Amenities
- Museum-grade art collection throughout
- Clunie Dining Room, wood-fired Scottish cooking
- Elsa's cocktail bar
- The Flying Stag traditional pub
- Spa treatment rooms and Highland bathhouse
- Whisky snug with rare Scotch collection
- Guided hillwalking, stalking and fishing
- Individually designed bedrooms