The Fife Arms is releasing its first book
Nestled in the highlands’ enclave of Braemar, a caber-toss away from Balmoral, lies the Fife Arms, a quaint Victorian hotel that was resplendently renovated and enlivened back in 2018. It now stands as one of the nation’s premier luxury hotels, already amassing a sea of accolades, glowing reviews and loyal fans.
Now, this cult hotel has collaborated with Phaidon to produce a beautiful book that perfectly encapsulates the venue’s sterling art, history and design.
It is hardly a surprise that the enviable interiors of the Fife Arms have been deemed worthy of their own tome when you consider the hotel’s owners. An art power couple (being the founders of one of the world’s leading contemporary galleries Hauser & Wirth) Manuela and Iwan Wirth fell in love with Braemar and its distinctive hotel when they first visited in 2010. The took on the dilapidated Fife Arms, intent on restoring it to its original glory in 2015, finally unveiling to the public in 2018 with a grand opening presided over by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall.
“Like generations of travellers before us, we fell instantly and incurably in love with the landscape and light of the Cairngorms,” the couple write in the introduction to their new book, The Fife Arms. “We were welcomed by a community that shared important information, local lore and no small amount of wonderfully wry humour. We were hooked.”
As befits their artistic pedigree, the hotel has not only been painstakingly restored with heritage prints, tartans, taxidermy and more, but has been filled with art pieces, both contemporary and historic, from an eerie large-scale Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture to a rare sketch by Queen Victoria herself. The hotel highlights both heritage and modern culture in its works, which comprise world-famous international artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, Mark Bardford, Lucian Freud and Man Ray, but also pieces by local creatives, such as the community knitting group Deeside Knitwits, who have supplied woollen planets for the hotel’s Astronomy Room.
The design is clever – both impossibly cosy and somehow fresh – blending tartans and dark mahoganies with swirling, contrasting ceiling murals. There are also installations and paintings that were created specifically for the hotel. The Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca is responsible for the jagged, strikingly abstract mural in the hotel’s formal Clunie Dining Room.
“There are two views from the room, one to the Clunie river and the other to a distant mountain,” says Kuitca. “I wanted to bring both into my work. When I was painting, I could hear the sounds of the water all the time, so the mural on the walls closest to the river is much more fluid; there are echoes of the flow of water in the rhythms and patterns of the paint. The longer wall tries to echo the mountain in the distance. I like to think of this work as a landscape.”
The author Dominic Bradbury, a travel, architecture and design journalist, has brilliantly chronicled this extraordinary venue, with insight from the owners, architects and more. The book features a multitude of images of this captivating hotel, where no two rooms are the same; where a piano plays by itself in the lobby; and where modern design and reverently rendered history sit comfortably and tantalisingly together. A must for travel- and art-lovers anywhere. If we can’t go to the Highlands yet, perhaps this will do for now…
‘The Fife Arms’ by Dominic Bradbury (Phaidon, £90) is published on 27 January.
