Into the wild: The Fife Arms, Upper Deeside, Scotland
‘Pathological collectors of objects’ Iwan and Manuela Wirth have created a Highlands retreat replete with art and luxury.
It’s not every day you have the chance to sit and enjoy a pint under the watchful eye of an enormous stag, or take tea in the company of a Picasso. Nor to sleep surrounded by a bevy of tiny birds or read a book with Queen Victoria for company.
Welcome to the magical, mysterious world of The Fife Arms, global art gallerists Iwan and Manuela Wirth’s luxury hotel in the Scottish Highlands, where past and present, historical and fantastical, glamour and complete madness all exuberantly collide.
Opened last December (with an official opening in January attended by Prince Charles, known locally as the Duke of Rothesay rather than Cornwall), The Fife Arms is unlike anywhere you can imagine. Not least perhaps for its location – an hour’s drive west of Aberdeen, bang in the heart of the tiny village of Braemar where the local population barely tallies 800 – but also for the sheer playfulness and warmth it exudes, and the intriguing narrative about the area’s history it has taken as inspiration.
Walking through the large front doors into the expansive ground floor reception, its hard to know where to look first. With its rust-hued walls, topped and tailed with intricate Victorian handblocked wallpapers, a grand mahogany sweeping staircase, dark, worn wooden floors layered with Persian carpets, and furniture upholstered in tartan, plush patterned velvet and antique needlepoint, it’s an exciting contrast to contemporary art pieces such as Mark Bradford’s Still Shining 2015, a collaged Steinway & Sons self-playing baby grand piano, and Richard Jackson’s Red Deer Chandelier 2018, mimicking enlarged bagpipe drones and antlers in vividly coloured glass and neon.
“I felt we needed to give some sort of hyper experience of the Highlands,” says Iwan Wirth, who opened the first Hauser & Wirth gallery in Switzerland with his wife and her mother, Ursula Hauser, in 1992. “It allowed us to give a lot of personality to the rooms, but my number-one rule was I didn’t want decoration. Everything had to have a reason for being there, and if it was decoration, it had to be art. But even the art had to make sense.”
On the hotel’s transformation, the Wirths worked with Ben Addy, of Aberdeen-London Moxon Architects, and his brother Tom, a construction specialist, to sensitively restore the original listed building with help from expert local craftsmen (including joiners, carpenters, blacksmiths, stonemasons and restorers).
They worked with fashion turned interior designer Russell Sage, known for such hotels as The Zetter Townhouses and The Goring in London, and the Hospital Club’s latest outpost in LA. They collected more than 20,000 items, drawing inspiration from a treasure trove of stories, from the history of the Highlands’ wild, rugged landscape, famous locals (including writers, poets, botanists and scientists) and royal connections (thanks to Queen Victoria, who built Balmoral Castle nearby in 1856, Braemar became a popular holiday destination).
Wirth and Sage sourced collections of rare Jacobite glass, taxidermy (birds, deer, local fauna such as badgers and hares, stags and does), antique paintings and frames, Victorian furniture, and even a waxwork of Queen Victoria from Madame Tussauds. Many pieces came from a nearby grand estate, Montrave House. They included an elaborately carved mahogany and pine chimney-piece depicting scenes from the poems of Robert Burns. The designer used more than 1500 fabrics, many of them Scottish but also Liberty London fabrics struck in bespoke colourways, and more than 70 original Victorian carpet chairs and sofas throughout the building. Layers of multiple-patterned wallpapers, painted cupboards, framed paintings and prints – “a very Victorian tradition”, says Sage – provide a “gear change to wake up a room”. The most important thing was to build a collection that felt like “it could have all come from one place”, says Sage, “but when overlaid with contemporary art, it is about everything pinging and zinging.”
In the enchanting, intimate Elsa’s bar, where you can treat yourself to a Shocking Pink glass of rhubarb-infused fizz, there is a portrait of Schiaparelli by Man Ray and little powder compacts from the Parisian fashion designer’s own vanity. Pieces such as little stools, wall lights and sofas reflect the period when she visited Frances Farquharson, a former editor of Vogue and first wife of 16th laird of Invercauld, who famously swathed Braemar Castle, from bathrooms, curtains and ceilings, in pink.
“We are pathological collectors of objects,” laughs Wirth. “The amateur in me loves to meet the experts who know about everything. It’s not about collecting to satisfy my ego. It’s much more about the learning process.”
Scottish textile designer Araminta Campbell was also commissioned to create both a tartan (based on the traditional Duke of Fife tartan, featured on the walls and furnishings of the Drawing Room) and a tweed (an adaptation of a Glen Check, its colours reflecting the nearby Scots Pine forests, the light green moss and grey-pink of the granite walls, and iron oxide). Woven locally, each has been used for everything from carpets and fabric for walls and furniture to throw rugs and uniforms.
Across the hotel’s 46 rooms and suites, the Wirths and Sage have paid homage to royals such as Queen Victoria and her granddaughter Louise the Princess Royal (who married Alexander Duff, the 1st Duke of Fife); literary greats such as Robert Louis Stevenson (who began Treasure Island while holidaying in Braemar); prime ministers such as George Hamilton Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen; the architect Alexander Marshall Mackenzie, responsible for building Crathie Kirk and Mar Lodge for the Duke and Duchess of Fife in the late 1890s; and the Highland clansman Rob Roy MacGregor. Even Queen Victoria’s ghillie, John Brown, Indian attendant Abdul Karim and her beloved border collie, Sharp, are honoured.
The Victoriana suites are lavishly swathed in antique furnishings, period wallpaper from Watts of Westminster and Bradbury & Bradbury, and original artwork to reflect the hotel’s origins as a 19th-century coaching inn. Sage worked with Scottish poet Alec Finlay to inspire handpainted scenes, based on the myths and mountains of the Scottish Highlands, across the walls of the cosy Croft rooms, and for words carved into the organically hewn wooden headboards in the Nature & Poetry rooms. Other rooms allude to famous events in the area including The Royal Highland Games (also known as The Braemar Gathering) or the Moorlands signature heather that washes the hillsides in a purple haze. The quirky Artis’s Studio features handpainted walls, bed and bath panels, and a paint splattered floor, and views stretching across the Cairngorms National Park.
A local flavour runs through dishes such as haggis, neeps and tatties, with a Lochnagar whisky sauce, or silky-smooth venison bresaola with almonds served for lunch in The Flying Stag, and Orkney scallops and heather-smoked blue mussels or birch-seared sea trout with hay-flamed butter lettuce in the Clunie Dining Room (named after the river that runs past the hotel). The enthusiasm of the staff is also one of its greatest charms.
Wirth doesn’t care if they know nothing about art, just as long as they’re curious to learn more. “I want everyone here to act as an art ambassador for the hotel,” he says. It’s impossible not to be intrigued by pieces such as Chinese artist Zhang Enli’s Ancient Quartz 2018 – inspired by cross sections of Scottish agates – swirled across the ceiling of the Drawing Room, or Indian artist Subodh Gupta’s Untitled 2018 chandelier in the Fire Room, which teams sieves, pails and tiffin boxes with colourful bulbs.
The surrounding area is rich with things to see and do, from hiking the hundreds of Munros (mountains over 3000 feet/900 metres) to skiing at Braemar’s Glenshee ski resort in the winter. Even an hour’s walk around the village and along the crystal-clear waters of the River Dee near the hotel affords a perfect insight into the beauty of the area, taking you past the 15th-century Braemar castle, the site of the first and second Jacobite Uprising. Further afield, take one of Braemar Highland Experience’s expert four-wheel driving tours (which will unveil beautiful river walks, visits to the Royal Lochnagar whiskey distillery and ancient ruins) or join the hotel’s forager Natasha Lloyd to learn more about the area’s botanical secrets, from wild mushrooms safe to eat and how to cook with juniper berries, pine needles and birch sap.
The 20th-century Aberdeen writer Nan Shepherd, who explored thousands of miles of the Cairngorms on foot, paints an inspiring picture of the area in The Living Mountain. The much-loved mountain range is as delectable as honey in the summer, its light luminous but not fierce. Birch trees are at their loveliest when not fully clothed, their scent after rain like that of “fruity, old brandy”. Here, she writes, the water is so unimaginably clear its taste tingles the throat and there is a sting of life in its touch.
The couple first discovered Scotland through Iwan’s passion for fly fishing. They settled on the Invercauld estate with a long-term rental, not far from Balmoral Castle, and on walks past The Fife Arms – at the time sadly run-down – wondered if there was a way to rescue it. Encouraged by the success of Hauser & Wirth’s outpost in Bruton, which includes a restaurant and farmhouse accommodation, Wirth says “one crazy day we made an offer on the hotel”.
Owning a hotel may seem a strange fit with running an art gallery (there are now nine, including London, New York, LA, Zurich and Hong Kong, with the tenth opening next year in Menorca), but to the Wirths it makes perfect sense. They are collectors of people as much as art. “We have always been a close-knit family but perhaps when we left Switzerland for London 15 years ago [to establish Hauser & Wirth on Piccadilly, now located on Savile Row], it became even more so, and we started to build our own community,” Iwan says. “We try to build a comfortable bubble around us. I hate being a tourist anywhere I go; one of the reasons we open galleries all over the world is to feel part of the fabric of a place. We create situations that remind us of home.”
“Home” was originally Switzerland, where Wirth grew up in Oberuzwil and Hauser (with her daughters Manuela and Sandra, and son Urs) in St Gallen. They share an inclusive and egalitarian approach to art. “It’s who we are, it’s how we live our lives – there’s a Swissness to the way a sense of entitlement is simply not part of our DNA,” he says. Access to art was easy when he was growing up, he explains, as every village had museums and art spaces, in the local hall or the bank.
He remembers his first visit to the then Hallen für Neue Kunst in Schaffhausen when he was seven, where he was enthralled with artworks by the likes of Giacometti, and his first time in a commercial gallery, at 13. “It was a revelation,” he says. “I borrowed money from my father to buy a painting and with the smell of the fresh oil paints, and the atmosphere being so elegant, I liked the spirit of it.” At just 16, he set up his own gallery, in 1986. He met Hauser around the same time, and she agreed to finance the purchase of a Picasso and a Chagall for resale (Wirth still deals in the secondary market for modern masters). In return, he helped to advise on her burgeoning collection, and in 1992 they opened the first Hauser & Wirth gallery in Zurich. Manuela kept the books and not long after she and Wirth became romantically involved.
Hauser has been a keen private collector since acquiring her first piece – a clay figure by the Swiss artist Meinrad Zünd – in the 1950s. When her husband died suddenly in 1973, she took over his position in the family’s chain of appliance stores, invested in property development and slowly grew her own art collection, now considered one of the most important private collections of modern and contemporary art in the world. Drawn not to what is “pleasing or beautiful” but rather to work that may be raw, unpolished and sometimes even disturbing, she has always sought out pieces that touched her emotionally and intellectually, explains the now 80 year old in The Inner Mirror: Conversations with Ursula Hauser, Art Collector, a series of interviews published last August.
Supporting, nurturing and showcasing artists is part of her love for “living with her art and engaging in an active exchange with those who have created it”, she says. Before opening in Zurich, she and Wirth rented a refurbished former train depot in St. Gallen to present larger works and installations, “the idea behind which was to create a place for encounters, not a gallery or a museum with strict opening hours where you do what you want to do in half an hour and go home again,” she says. They had a cafeteria, bookshop and educational program with tours and workshops for children – “the antithesis of a white cube where you simply hang art”.
More than 20 years later, they repeated the idea at Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset outpost. Set on a former 1700s model farm, the building was restored with the help of architect Luis Laplace. It includes a gallery, education centre, the Roth Bar & Grill (an ode to the late artist Dieter Roth), a shop and a “perennial meadow” landscaped by Piet Oudolf (known for his work on the High Line in New York). At the bottom of the garden looms a UFO-like pavilion, designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radi for the Serpentine Gallery in 2014.
There is also the Grade II listed Durslade Farmhouse for rent (sleeping up to 12), with interiors marked by site-specific installations from some of Hauser & Wirth’s favourite artists, including a video and chandelier installation by Pipilotti Rist and a dining room abstractly handpainted by Guillermo Kuitca (similarly replicated in the Clunie Dining Room at The Fife Arms). Most recently they also opened Make, a gallery on Bruton’s high street dedicated to supporting contemporary craft, exhibiting and selling work by both British and international makers.
Often described as the gallery world’s “power couple” – their rollcall of artists includes Turner Prize-winner Martin Creed, hyperrealist Australian sculptor Ron Mueck, the late surrealist artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois and Californian multi-media artist Paul McCarthy – the Wirths are surprisingly publicity shy and unassuming. At 50, Wirth effervesces with a loquacious enthusiasm for life. “If we had known honestly the effort and financial investment needed for The Fife Arms, we probably wouldn’t have done it,” he laughs. “But that is the advantage of having a lot of enthusiasm. If Manuela, who is always a bit more rational than me, also agrees it’s a good idea, then all hell breaks loose and we’re off. We like crazy projects on the edge, because no one else will do them.”
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