Best hotels in St Andrews

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!

St Andrews is golf's spiritual home, and few addresses sit closer to its beating heart than The Old Course. Built in 1968 on the site of the old railway station, the hotel now stands wing to wing with the Old Course's 17th, the Road Hole, where professionals still aim blind over a cluster of replica railway sheds planted in its own garden. Inside, the legacy runs deep: corridors named for golfers long dead, black-and-white photographs of Opens gone by, and a snow cabin spa that feels like nothing else in the home of golf. Cathedral ruins sit on one side, the North Sea on the other. This is proper bucket-list territory and it's fabulous!

St Andrews doesn't do subtle when it comes to golf, and neither does Rusacks. Built in 1887 by Johann Wilhelm Rusack, a German émigré who swapped Lower Saxony for the Fife coast, the hotel has spent well over a century propped directly above the 18th green of the Old Course, close enough to watch both triumph and heartbreak play out from your bedroom window. It's now the flagship of Marine & Lawn's collection of course-side hotels, and is adorned in golfing memorabilia and sophisticated, thoroughly Scottish details. And did we mention the R&A Clubhouse is right next door? You couldn't get closer to golf's beating heart if you tried.

St Andrews has obsessed over a small white ball for six centuries, and Seaton House sits right in the thick of it on The Scores, with the Old Course's first tee close enough to wave at. Behind its restored 1864 townhouse facade are 42 rooms in oak panelling and tartan, plus three distinct places to eat and drink. Beyond golf, there's a cathedral ruin, a 600-year-old university and West Sands beach, cinematic and vast, right outside. This isn't a country retreat, but rather a clifftop townhouse with sea air, single malt and one of sport's most storied views built in.

'Kith' is an old Scots word for the people and places that feel like home, which sets the tone rather nicely. This shiny boutique hotel is in the middle of St Andrews, the medieval university town that gave the world golf, and it wears its heritage lightly. Behind three restored 1847 facades you'll find 44 design-forward rooms, a chef-led restaurant the locals have already adopted, and a front door barely 200 yards from the Old Course's 18th green. Elegant without being stuffy, it's equally happy hosting golfers, visiting parents and anyone after a smart Scottish weekend. Dogs are welcome, too.

Gleneagles opened in 1924 as the Caledonian Railway's answer to the French Riviera, complete with its own station, and it still plays the part of grand Highland resort rather than country-house hideaway. The 850-acre estate wraps around three championship golf courses, including Jack Nicklaus's PGA Centenary Course, host of the 2014 Ryder Cup. Beyond the fairways there's a falconry school, gundog training, off-road driving and a spa the size of a small village hall. Two Michelin stars glow at Restaurant Andrew Fairlie, still run by his long-time team. It's less a hotel than a self-contained Highland world, golf clubs optional.