Best hotels in St Andrews

Gleneagles has spent 100 years as Perthshire's home of golf and gundogs - and now it has a sassy little sister, right on St Andrew Square in the well-heeled grid of Edinburgh's Georgian New Town. Located in the old Bank of Scotland building, the Gleneagles Townhouse is announced discreetly by a tiny plaque on the stone wall outside, but step inside and you'll enter a vibrant world of giant palms, Murano chandeliers, jewelled velvets and hummingbird-bedecked walls. The past is everywhere, too: cocktails in the grand old Telling Room, a spa built into the strong rooms once used for storing gold and silver, and a roof terrace guarded by magnificent Georgian statuary.

Just nine miles from Balmoral, Braemar is one of Britain's highest, coldest villages. Its grandest old coaching inn, built in 1856 and once a place where Queen Victoria swapped her horses, stood shabby for decades until art dealers Iwan and Manuela of Hauser & Wirth spent four years (and many millions) reinventing it. The result? A Highland inn that's part traditional village pub, part serious art gallery (there's a Lucian Freud and a bronze Bourgeois spider among the 16,000 works), and part psychedelic Highland dream. Nothing else in Scotland comes close... In fact, possibly nowhere does!