One of the books artfully piled up on the coffee table in the German Emperor, our Victoriana-themed bedroom in the Fife Arms hotel in Braemar, Aberdeenshire, was a copy of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. The windows opposite our canopied bed looked directly on to Braemar Kirk and to the Cairngorms beyond. It’s here where Shepherd, the Scottish poet, novelist and hill-walker, had a “shanty” high on the edge of the Highlands mountain range, and would retreat to write and connect with nature.
You can do the same at the reinvented Fife Arms which, luxe and fantastical as it is, pays homage to the landscape, admittedly in unexpected ways. For instance, mounted twigs fashioned as antlers form a frieze around the walls of the reassuringly traditional Flying Stag, the hotel’s public bar. More than 500 stag antlers, sourced by the owner of the local horn shop, are locked together either side of the mounted stag over the bar. And as for the bar, it stocks more than 180 whiskies, including single malts from Royal Lochnagar, the distillery up the road from Balmoral.
If the antler motifs in the bar were unsettling for visitors up from the Great Wen, then the flock of stuffed birds suspended from the ceiling in the stairwell up to our bedroom had a Hitchcockian edge. More twig trophies lined the corridors, and a glass case of stuffed peculiarities dominated the ante room between our plush suite and the main staircase. This overall effect was one that echoed and celebrated local nature, yet gave a fantastic, other-worldly air.
It was a challenge to leave our bedroom, given the cosy house tartan furnishings, the sweet Victoria and Albert figurines on the windowsill and the chaise longue beneath the window. My husband lay on it, The Living Mountain in hand. He was new to Nan, lucky him, and I couldn’t move him. I duly set off for a solo walk along the Queen’s Drive, one of Vic’s favourite carriage routes that crosses Clunie Water, and towards Lion’s Face. I didn’t make it to the rocky viewpoint, though, lest I missed cocktail hour back at the Arms. Looking over the magnificent Dee valley, I resolved to return for longer than a weekend and bag a Munro or two.
A meditation on the Cairngorms awaited my husband and me in both the drawing room and Clunie dining room. Seated on a Liberty-print sofa, a real live Picasso on the wall behind us, the two of us all dressed up (as one positively must be for an evening in this fun-house), we admired the frescoed ceiling. I took it for a rainbow interpretation of the contour lines of an Ordnance Survey map. In fact, its creator, Chinese artist Zhang Enli, was inspired by Scottish agates seen in cross-section.
After cocktails in the Elsa Schiaperelli-inspired pink art deco bar surrounded by Man Rays (the Italian designer was a friend of the 16th Laird of nearby Invercauld estate, Captain Alwyn Farquharson, whose wife Frances was editor of American Vogue), we repaired to the baronial dining room. Here, a mural by Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca responds to the Cairngorms with cubist exuberance. What a shiny venison-slicing machine is doing by the window, I don’t know. We ate heartily, enjoying wood-fired dishes. Suffice to say, the food is sensational, the staff charming and chatty.
The joy of this quirky hotel, painstakingly restored and re-imagined by local architect Ben Addy of Moxon Architects, based in nearby Crathie and in London, and owned by Iwan and Manuela Wirth of the international art galleries Hauser & Wirth, is that so many areas are open to non-guests; it is a pleasure dome for all, though there are surprises for guests only. One of them is the library. This room competes with the courtyard, home to a Louise Bourgeois spider, to be my favourite space in a hotel full of surprises.
The next morning after breakfast – an enlivening experience, what with the outsize genitals of a bronze stag at eye level, the menacing presence of a Gerhard Richter eagle to my right, and a rhapsodic kedgeree – we took a tour with Katy Fennema from Braemar Highland Experience. It was very jolly, as she whisked out a hipflask filled with the water of life and passed round her own homemade shortbread whenever we stopped to look at a view or to admire the Linn of Dee, a local picnic spot. The trip focused on the area and its history. She also offers a wildlife tour where you can spot red deer, mountain hares and red squirrels.
Later, we set off in search of the cottage that Robert Louis Stevenson rented to recover from a cold one summer. He ended up writing Treasure Island there. Our last stop was another local curio, Braemar Castle, visited in the company of the splendid Simon Blackett of Yellow Welly Tours. The castle’s restoration is a local initiative, and it has a deliciously eccentric collection of local memorabilia. It was the final stop in a trip that put a Highland spring in my step.
• This article was amended on 29 May 2019 to clarify details of available local services.
Essentials
Rooms at the Fife Arms cost from £250 per night B&B. Braemar Highland Experience and Yellow Welly Tours offer bespoke tours of the region
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