Cairngorm Chic

Blink and you’ll miss the visual splendour at The Fife Arms in Scotland, writes Stephen Short.

- Stephen Short

Few hotels in the world induce aesthetic delirium quite like The Fife Arms in Braemar, Scotland, where visual diversions abound – so many and so various – it’s nigh on impossible to know which way to look. There’s a Lucian Freud portrait and Mark Bradford’s Steinway pianola (self-playing piano) in the lobby. Then a Gerhard Richter in the dining room. Advance to the drawing-room, and what looks like a Pablo Picasso on the right wall, or at least a copy, is the original Mousquetaire Assis (1967) and would fetch in excess of US$30 million (S$40.5 million) plus at auction; on an opposite wall hangs an innocuous pencil and watercolour of a stag’s head – by an enthusiastic amateur more commonly known as Queen Victoria.

Oh, and as your eyes ascend the staircase in this semi-baronial hall-meets-costume drama film set-meets-visual adventure playground, a neon orb composed of bagpipes and glass antlers cascades like a glistening exclamation mark from the ceiling above the banisters; Red Deer Chandelier, a commissioned piece by Los Angeles-based artist Richard Jackson. Thus, you could explore nothing else at The Fife but this space, surreal in a Giorgio de Chirico kind of way, safe in the knowledge that you’d appropriated Royalism, Cubism and Blade Runner-ism in the heady and iridescent blink and dash of an eyeliner.