"Plenty of pubs in Scotland have names like the Flying Stag. The one in the new Fife Arms hotel in the Highland village of Braemar, however, actually has a taxidermy stag, with added swan’s wings, poised not so much in mid-leap as in mid-launch over the bar, like an antlered space shuttle, and the energy here is irresistible. Same goes for the Fife Arms as a whole, down to the shocking-pink cocktail spot, Elsa’s, named after Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli (its turns out she adored the Highlands). The 46-room hotel takes a familiar tartan-clad template and—with love and respect, and even a kind of delicacy—blows it to smithereens. Braemar hasn’t seen the like since Victoria and Albert built the castle at nearby Balmoral. Its owners, Swiss art dealers Manuela and Iwan Wirth, previously hit the bull’s-eye with their gallery-restaurant-hotel in Bruton, Somerset, which has mobilized hundreds of thousands of art lovers since 2009 and transformed the community. The Fife Arms is different, in that it’s primarily a hotel, not an exhibition space—though, bedecked as it is in works by Picasso, Freud, Richter, and so forth, you could be forgiven for thinking of it as one. Even the rooms, from designer Russell Sage, which range in size and budget and bear grand names such as the Duke of Fife Suite, are a mastery of textile and layering. His sense of humor, more blatantly on display at London’s Zetter Townhouse, shines through—and its impact could well be as dramatic. —Steve King" - Jamie Spain
