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Gleneagles Hotel grows
The Carse of Gowrie orchards, in Perthshire, Scotland, date back to 1750 – and apple and pear trees are being replanted by The Gleneagles Hotel.
By: Mary Gostelow
Gleneagles’ future-vision community-environmental program won the luxury resort Leading Hotels of the World’s 2009 Sustainability award.
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The program includes voluntary contributions by guests of the resort. A £1 a night contribution per room is given to the Perthshire Big Tree Country initiative, which is replanting apple and pear fruit trees in the Carse of Gowrie orchards (photo). Other elements of the program include the installation of a Biomass Boiler, which lowers carbon emissions by 24% and saves 29% of cost. For the resort, an employees’ Waste (sic, not waist) Watchers team comes up with idea for more details that can be added to the program, and a ‘tree’ painted on a main behind-scenes corridor at the resort has a green leaf added every time an initiative is actually achieved.
Right, all this makes The Gleneagles Hotel sound like the very model of a modern Scottish castle-resort. What is it actually like staying there? Mary Gostelow reports:
As the BMW-7 glides around the turning circle towards the end of the long drive from the main street (if it can be called that, since all around is greenery, with rolling hills in the distance) you instantly think of story-book gardening. The turning circle is a green-edged round flower bed, multi blooms divided into parterres. The car turns right, and there, 200 yards ahead, is the seriously-imposing five-floor stone building that is Gleneagles. In the center of the original block, a tower about 30 feet across, rises another floor, and from its castellated roof a flagpole bears the white diagonal cross on blue flag of St Andrew, patron saint of Scotland.
You continue along, with more exquisite flower beds and lawns either side, to the final turning circle. At the right here is a croquet lawn that has been mown, one way and then at right angles, to produce a self-colored verdant plaid. Straight ahead, under the glass-topped wrought iron porte cochere, stand a couple of doormen wearing kilts in the blue and green tartan specially created for Gleneagles by Kinloch Anderson, the firm that makes tartans for the Royal Family.
Oh what connections there are here at The Gleneagles Hotel, the 850-acre luxury resort that has evolved around the original house, designed by architect Matthew Adam and built for a mere £20,000 in 1924 for the Caledonian Railway Company. Bits have been added on and added on - oh so tastefully, I add immediately - so now this Leading Hotel of the World has 232 rooms, a magnificent 20 treatment room spa, two indoor pools, three and a half golf courses and a busy Clubhouse, Golf Academy, an Equestrian School, Off-Road Driving School, Shooting and Fishing school, British School of Falconry and Gundog School. Not to mention a choice of four restaurants, tennis, a hair salon and barbers, excellent children’s facilities and goodness knows what else. With an average of 600 staff, depending on season, there is a ratio of more than one per guest, which ensures the resort maintains its world-class reputation. There is also a complimentary vacation-ownership development, Glenmor, and dotted around the estate are numerous private villas.
The mighty international drinks conglomerate Diageo has owned this, its only hotel, since 1985. Diageo is not surprisingly extremely proud of Gleneagles, and has spent lots of money and tender loving care in retaining its past, and bringing it up to the latest present. The original house, with big rooms and high-high ceilings, lots of columns and picture windows, has been restored to its Art Deco glory. The lobby and adjacent bar, both magnificent rooms, are soft mole and dull sage and orange, and bright orange standing lamps have been added in the bar to add that little extra je-ne-sais-quoi.
I am greeted, by front desk women in gray suits with orange neck scarves, and taken up to the Blue Tower Suite, one of ten Spirits Suites designed by Amanda Rosa to evoke the aroma of spirits in the Diageo portfolio. The 1,700 sq ft Blue Tower Suite is subtly, oh so subtly, themed for Johnnie Walker Blue label. Enter the two-bedroom suite and you have the twin-bed area on your right, the double-bed area on the your left. We are going to use the double bedroom. Still by that main door, reach out to your left and you find a Johnnie Walker walking stick, in a stand. Throughout this glorious suite, carpeting is soft mushroom with a darker mushroom plaid pattern, walls are pale mole, windows at this level have soft turquoise Roman blinds. The double bedroom has a walk-in closet with plenty of hanging, a trouser press and an easy-to-work Elsafe. The desk has ample sockets, an iPod holder and easy WiFi. Stationery, in a standing rack, includes embossed Conqueror notepaper and double-sized postcards.
The bed has a deep-mole fabric headboard that rises high, with side extensions, as if to keep you warm, and a blue cashmere throw was specially made by Johnstons of Newmill. A ceiling-set fiber optic light helps reading in bed. You turn to your left for the wall-set Sony television. Below it, three turquoise tea-caddies on a bureau hold coffee, teabags and so on. In the bureau is a minibar, with Pommery, an Alessi kettle and coffee plunger, and silver-handled WMF Hotel china mugs. You have Green & Black's Organic and Lindt Lindor chocolates, and Kettle chips. Turquoise worry beads lie in a black vase on a low wood table in front of a deep mushroom sofa that has some mushroom, some turquoise cushions. A handy side table holds books, historic hardbacks in the form of a leather-bound 1818-edition of the Scottish dictionary, and, also leather-bound, volumes one and two of the works of Robert Burns and three books on Old and New Edinburgh. These sit with three fabric-bound tomes on The Scottish Highlands: Highland Clans and Regiments. I have so much to read. Magazines elsewhere in the suite include Scottish Field and the resorts own Shopping Gleneagles Style, produced by golfpublishing.ltd.uk
Up four carpeted stairs into the enormous, though windowless, bathroom, completely clad in honey-coloured marble. The shower, with a range of faucets including a two foot-wide rainforest showerhead, is large enough for you and your closest friends. You have a sunken oval Kohler bathtub, a pair of oval Kohler sinks, an electric heated towel rail, Asprey London Purple Water 75ml toiletries, complemented by Arran Aromatics bathsalts and Molton Brown's bracing silverbirch bodywash. The two Exclusive Linens Regal robes are embroidered with the suite's name, and there is a card from housekeeper Marguerite Courtney about re-using linens.
I had just settled in to email - wireless, speedy and complimentary - when there was a hearty knock on the heavy wood door. Hello said Patrick, in that divine French tone that only good-looking men from the Riviera seem to do naturally. I am the fourth floor butler. Is there anything I can do for you? I have put some canapés upstairs for you. I went up four stairs to an interim landing housing a graceful spiral staircase, the whole surrounded by royal blue wallpaper featuring seven full-size silhouettes of Johnnie Walker (the paper was hand-printed at Glasgow Art College). I climbed 15 carpeted spiral stairs to my salon, which has two more blind-covered windows looking down at the immaculate mowed lawns and flower-flanked main drive. Up here I had a round glass table with four bronze-leather dining chairs, a sofa with soft cushions, and another refreshment bar, with a Siemens Nespresso machine, a can of hotel chocolate chip cookies and a boxed bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label Scotch. Black-framed wall art is three original blending pages from Mr Walker himself, and four black-and-white botanic close-up photos. A low table held a wood bowl made from a cross-section of Scottish Borders elm, and outsized modern books, including Riedel: 250 Years in Glass, Droemer; Luxury Toys, and Sotheby's SCP Auctions. Closed doors hid a wall-mounted Sony home movie theater, and PlayStation 3. Another door revealed a further 14 steps to the real-rooftop private terrace - yes, I am right on top of that central turret of the original building! The flag, of St Andrew and of Scotland, flies above me. I have wooden furniture up here, but
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even in mid-winter it is invigorating to come up here, to look down, as the king from his castle, so to speak. I can see down to some of the golf areas.
The 40th Ryder Cup will be played on PGA Centenary Course in 2014. This 18-hole Jack Nicklaus created course, opened in 1993, has tees graded at each hole in five stages, including a challenging 6,815 yards from the white markers down to 5,322 from the red. You begin by playing southeast towards the glen, sweeping up the Ochil Hills to the summit of the pass below Ben Shee which joins it to Glendevon - at all times there is a feast of views of the spectacular countryside here. Putting on the two-tier second green, you are distracted by the lush panorama of the rich Perthshire straths. As you move westwards over the next few holes, the rugged Grampians come into view on the right, and then distantly purple ahead, Ben Vorlich and the mountains above the Trossachs. James Braid, one of the golfing greats, designed and created the King’s and Queen’s Courses. Braid had won five Open Championships between 1901 and 1910 and then turned to golf course design. The King’s and Queen’s created out of a wilderness using manual labour, pick and shovel, horse and cart, were ready much earlier than the hotel and began to make their name between 1918 and 1924. The nine-hole Wee Course was designed by the head greenkeeper, George Alexander and opened in the summer of 1928.
I was booked for a treatment at the splendid Spa at Gleneagles by ESPA. To get to it I went back down to the ground floor and wended my way through an arcade - think of London's Burlington Arcade, but make the walkway more intimate and add lots of oak-edged windows and doors - going in between the jewelry, cashmere, whisky and other shops for which Gleneagles is also renowned. This walkway opens into a meeting point from which the kids' club, a coffee lounge, a restaurant, The Club leisure area and the spa lead. You go through heavy silver-edged wood doors to enter the inner sanctum that is this 20-treatment room spa. Young women in neat chocolate-colored short-sleeve fitted pyjamas danced, as it were, in a chocolate-brown stage, strategically lit so you can easily see. In the women's locker I found white robe and slippers awaiting, and I then relaxed in a central area with big ceiling windows atop a palm tree in an ornamental pond and brown buttoned seats and day-beds, brown leather-bound magazines (for some reason I got straight into Autocar, do not ask why). Kim takes me to a treatment room, a brown and cream cocoon, with electronic music to increase the anti stress levels. She uses on me ESPA's delicious deep cleansing balm, replenishing face treatment cream and essential mineral mask, and finishes by offering a very welcome glass of elderflower water. I checked out the unisex indoor water area, with vitality stations, and the women-only herbal showers with ice bowl. Then I headed to The Club for a swim in one of the two indoor pools, one of which is a big curvilinear pool-for-families and the other is lap-style, for serious swimming. Good, there was a swimwear drier, and, showered, I re-took that hike back to the lobby, and - no elevators for fit people - up the 104 stairs from the lobby to the top floor, my beautiful suite.
Later, we met for dinner in the main bar, an elegant room leading off the lobby that must have been, nearly a hundred years ago, an equally-elegant sitting room or tea lounge. Now it has a 360-degree central bar, with high counter and magnificent high-backed chairs in Charles Rennie Mackintosh style. We preferred lower armchairs, and I looked around me at the soft apricot and mole so-Art-Deco hues, highlighted since my last visit by the addition of bright orange upside-down bell-shaped glass lights. A request for Moët produced the bottle, a 2000 vintage - nothing less here at The Gleneagles Hotel - and my glass sat on a paper coaster showing the torso of a woman luxuriating in that spa.
Dining options, which draw non-hotel guests from up to 45 miles away, include golf-course fare in the Dormy Clubhouse, and the book-far-ahead two-Michelin starred Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles, closed tonight, the stylish and classical Strathearn and the lovely new Deseo. This last, multi-area restaurant, so sensibly placed for fitness and general areas, and for all bedrooms, was designed by the luxury hotel's own food man, Alan Hill, working with professional designers Sedley Place, with kitchen by CNG. The 100-seat restaurant has well-lit more casual areas, for families, through to a central 'market', with glass domed ceiling above and display cases holding meats in one, fish in another, and so on, and on past this to curtained off inner-boudoir dining areas. There is similar variety in the menus, from kids' tapas menus through simple or elaborate buffets from the fixed ship-like King Buffet sculpture through to your grill to order, in one of two charcoal-fuelled closed Josper Grills. Dishes can also be cooked at the theater-display working kitchen back in the main area.
I was sitting with two fabulous foodies at a tall wood table in the market hall. Our places were set with Figgio Norwegian china, Sant'Andrea Italian cutlery, Riedel Austrian glassware - and we drank Italian, Pomino Bianco 2007 Marchesi de Frescobaldi, and Spanish, Pago de los Capellanes 2007 Tinto Roble Ribera del Duero. The food was Mediterranean, with Scotland not surprisingly put in on my map. Our cold tapas, all in little earthenware dishes, included yummy green asparagus, and Lebanese hummus and babhagannouj, and great big Gordal olives from Seville. Hot tapas included Portuguese salt cod brandade, and spicy chicken wings. This was followed by porcini risotto with grilled radicchio. The guys went on to thinly carved beef fillet on a wood plank and I had Loch Duart salmon, with sides of olive oil mash and addictive fried zucchini chips.
After all that I knew I would sleep like a log. At night turndown I get a tomorrow's information sheet, with the weather forecast and such as golfing's kids go free, and details of tPerthshire's Big Tree Country initiative. The room service doorknob offers half-hour slots from 6.30 through to 10.30: the inclusive comes with enormous choices of beverages, breads, cereals and components and hot items. In the morning, at other times of year, I might run to Tullybardine chapel (six miles) or around the golf courses (a three-mile set run), or borrow a mountain bike to cycle to Kinkell Bridge over River Earn (ten miles total). But it was a little cold and I was short of time so at 6.30 am I was first into the gym, which has dozens of Technogym bits and a spinning room. Then I did a quick swim, and, after using the dryer, put my bikini over the hot rail in my bathroom.
Breakfast in the Strathearn restaurant is not to be missed - this is a Scottish breakfast at its epitomal best. Tables are set with Dudson china, purple orchids and soft pink linens. We were poured delicious and slightly tart freshest juice, and coffee came in silver pots. There were butter rounds, and Gillie's Fine Food preserves, from Inverness, on the table. Up at the buffet stations, there were local berries, good Greek, local organic and designer-Loseley fruit yogurts and, a real hit with the many golfers around, all the hot dishes plus the oh-so-Scottish black pudding sausage and a whole Marrbury smoked salmon. I loved the Scottish 'morning rolls', light as air, flour-dusted baps, and, what a treat, the toast not only came in a silver toast rack but it was made from hand-sliced 'real bread' rather than the machine-sliced 'flavorless commercial bread' that today, sadly, is increasingly the breakfast norm, worldwide. But The Gleneagles Hotel is beyond the norm in so many ways. That is why I, and so many others, love it. Sadly, it was time to go.
The Gleneagles Hotel, Perthshire, United Kingdom
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