"In 2009 Manuela and Iwan Wirth—arguably the most influential contemporary art dealers in the world today—transformed Durslade Farm, a working farm near Bruton, Somerset into a wildly successful gallery-guesthouse-restaurant combo. Mud, manure, macrobiotics, and masterpieces. Ten years later they put a similar kind of lightning in a different sort of bottle at the other end of the country, in the Scottish Highlands with the Fife Arms, a former hunting lodge in Braemar not far from Balmoral Castle. Balmoral was the preferred rural hideout of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Together they more or less invented the tartan-clad, caber-tossing, shortbread-tin version of Scottishness that most of us these days accept as historical fact. The Fife Arms takes this quaint fantasy, spikes its whisky with acid, electrifies the bagpipes, and dials them up to 11. It would be difficult to overstate the strangeness of the place or the sense of childlike wonder to which it gives rise. Scotland has some fine hotels but the Fife Arms is something else. For now, at least, it’s in a category all its own." - Steve King
