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.

And in Braemar, of all places. Yet to cultural nomads of The Fife (four years in the making following near bankruptcy) it’s little wonder given the stealthy resume of its Swiss power-couple owners, Iwan and Manuela Wirth, co-presidents of Zurich-based Hauser & Wirth art gallery. Britain’s