Inside the newly revamped Gleneagles!
What do you think of when you think of Gleneagles? Glens and eagles, of course - this is Scotland after all - but, more than anything, golf. Yes, GOLF. Now, here at Tatler we are embracing sorts; we champion all manner of hobbies and leisure activities, especially ones involving the great outdoors, heather and tweed. But golf is not up there in our top 10 country pursuits. We are not exactly sniffy about golf (we don't encourage sniffiness), but it does slightly conjure images of patterned carpets and shiny bars populated by chaps in dun-coloured slacks having conversations about ride-on lawnmowers. But Gleneagles is undergoing a huge metamorphosis - it has been taken over by a vigorous and urbane young hotelier called Sharan Pasricha, famous for the Hoxton Hotels, a hipster-filled, bare-brick, laptop-out kind of a place. And one of his first moves, after buying the hotel for about £150m in 2015, was to change the logo. The eagle no longer clutches a golf ball (which was improbable in the first place) but a sort of square diamond thing. Much more swanky.
Indeed, swank is the new order of the day, the swag and tartan and Seventies vibes having been replaced by plush fabrics, polished wood, bevelled mirrors and gleaming natural light. 'Back in the Twenties, when Gleneagles was founded, there were cocktails on tap, there were beautiful bands, ladies in gorgeous gowns, people racing their Mercedes and Ferraris against the train to get here. People were allowed to be naughty. Over the years, Gleneagles has begun to take itself very seriously. It's almost become institutionalised, because the brand is so strong. I want to bring a bit of naughty back,' explains Sharan over a Springbank single malt in the Century Bar, by the light of a fading Scottish sun. There are other whiskies on offer, for almost £2,000 a dram, but not even I am that naughty.
I am getting ahead of myself.
Gleneagles is a Scottish icon, up there with Edinburgh Castle and Nicola Sturgeon's haircut. It was founded in 1924 by the Caledonian Railway company, which had a station in the Strathearn valley, a splendid spot for a hotel. In those days, golf was a very smart thing to do, and Gleneagles soon found itself on the society calendar, a place for pleasure and leisure and whacking tiny balls into the picturesque distance. There were three golf courses. But unlike at some places we could mention, the golf is not happening directly outside the hotel windows. You don't feel as if you are actually being besieged by the golfers - they are off elsewhere, strolling manfully about the clipped greens, all 700 acres of them. And unlike some other places we could mention, it offers many, many more activities (and has many, many more in the pipeline, including a ferret school), like shooting, riding, fishing, gundog training and falconry. Which is what I wanted to do first, naturellement.
The British School of Falconry, now based at Gleneagles, was founded in 1982 and is the oldest school of falconry in the UK. It is run by Emma and Steve Ford, whose idea of fun is to hunt rabbits on the Scottish moors with golden eagles. But my friend for the morning is Victor. Victor is a Harris hawk. Apparently, Harris hawks are the easiest birds of prey to work with because they are gregarious and hunt in packs, and so consider humans just another (admittedly flightless and therefore inferior) part of their team. Emma teaches me how to position my hand so that Victor can perch comfortably (birds of prey are always held in the left hand by right-handed people, which leaves the right hand free to wield a sword, obvs), how to swing my arm to let him fly off and how to lure him back with little lumps of meat. There is also a floppy dead baby chicken - which Emma waves about when Victor decides he does not want to come down from a tree - and a fur-wrapped plastic bottle, with a bit of meat attached, which I drag along the ground to simulate rabbit hunting. Victor is rather haughty and marvellous, and I am allowed to stroke his breast, but not his back - because, I am told, birds of prey have a 'preen gland' that secretes the oil with which they coat their wings to make themselves waterproof (another fabulous fact is that younger birds have fluffier feathers to protect them because they are more clumsy, so they will bounce if they fall).
Emma and Steve will also be in charge of the proposed ferret school. At the moment, the Gleneagles ferrets are used to flush out prey while hunting with the birds, but at the school guests will be taught how to handle them and walk them on leashes, and there will be a specially designed warren into which the ferrets will be sent with trackers on, so their progress can be followed. (Another fact: before Charles and Diana's wedding, in 1981, ferrets wearing harnesses with cables attached were sent down into the pipes of London to help lay additional television cabling.)
After lunch in the David Collins Studio- revamped Century Bar, with its revamped menu (scallops, langoustines, fresh local produce - all a damned sight more appetising than that dead chicken), it was time for my shooting lesson, in which I was given a big shiny shotgun and, with my teacher, sauntered about the 13 different clay targets (the unique ptarmigan, the blackcock, the bolting rabbit...). The Haggis, 'a jumping target that propels itself away from the shooter', was my speciality.
But my transformation into an outdoorswoman was not yet complete. That afternoon, I also had a ride at the Gleneagles Equestrian School, my first time on a horse since I was bolted with 20 years ago. There is an indoor arena, an outdoor arena and a lovely stable for the 26 lovely horses and ponies - and I had about the most gentle, confidence-building reintroduction to riding that I could have hoped for. Of course, much more advanced riders are catered for as well - there are even carriage-driving lessons.
Sharan has tried all the sports on offer at Gleneagles, along with 'lots that aren't even on offer yet', he tells me over Hebridean crab and compressed cucumber in the Strathearn Restaurant, which has yet to get its revamp. He is 35 and was raised in India, attending the Doon School. 'It is in the foothills of the Himalayas, and three or four times a year we would go on expeditions on our bikes or on foot, with very little money, which was when I fell in love with the outdoors.' His father is an entrepreneur, so the hustling instinct runs fast in Sharan's veins. At eight years old, he was asking his mother for extra sandwiches for his packed lunch so he could sell them at school - he bought comics with the profits. At 15, he came to England, to board at Millfield School on a squash bursary. He did a business degree at Regent's University, interning at banks in the UK and Asia over the summer holidays and setting up a media start-up catering for students after he graduated. Three years later, he went to Delhi to take over his uncle's leather-goods factory, which employed 300 people to make, oddly, lederhosen. 'It was a sort of MBA in the real world. I had to make redundancies, I had to change people's perception of how certain things were done. I learnt some really important life lessons.' One of those was that not everyone is very receptive to change - Sharan had his car stoned and his effigy was burned outside the factory. 'We doubled revenues, tripled profits, branched out into different product categories. But after three years of devoting my life to this, I had to decide whether I wanted to be the leather king of India or not.
He decided not. During this time he had met his future wife 'in Goa, which is sort of our St Tropez'. They decided to move back to London, where he spent two years at the London Business School. While there, he started work at a turnaround firm and got his first exposure to the hotel business, stumbling across the Hoxton Hotel. There are now three Hoxton Hotels operated by Sharan's company, Ennismore, with seven more projects in the pipeline in 'gentrifying areas in cities, amazing areas in cities that are changing - Chicago, Amsterdam,' he explains, as a bagpiper tootles away in the corner of the dining room.
Sharan recognises that the leap from Hoxton to Gleneagles seems an unlikely one, but he is embracing the traditions of his new acquisition ('You must try this shortbread!'), realising that the magic of the place is its history, its location, the dedicated people who have worked here for three decades, the traditions, the golf. 'Golf will always be an integral part of our business - we have no plans to crush two golf courses into one,' he says. But he does want to make the place more 'relevant'. Ennismore has bought a 250-acre farm down the road, and Sharan is playing with ideas: 'What if you had everything from posh teepees to Martha's Vineyard-style cottages? What if Soho House did Gleneagles?' The redecorated rooms and areas are lovely, fresh and luxurious, but traditional at the same time.
Many parts of the hotel still await the magic-wand treatment, so walking around the place can sometimes feel a bit like an exercise in interior-design time travel. But Sharan has plans for everything - for the brasserie his thinking is: 'What if Gleneagles did Balthazar?' And although he is only at the hotel once a week, when not there he is sending the chefs at Gleneagles photographs of truffled-chicken sandwiches he has eaten in places like Chicago's Fulton Market district and asking them to recreate the dish. 'I said, "Let's R&D this" - seven truffled-chicken sandwiches later, the Century Bar truffled-chicken sandwich was born.'
So the next day, somewhat exhausted by all my exertions, I eat the Century Bar truffled-chicken sandwich and watch the rain dousing the purple and green hills (and the golfers) and think, 'Yes, I like the idea of cocktails on tap and beautiful bands and girls in gowns, almost as much as I like Victor the Harris hawk.'
Murdo MacLeod1/5The Century Bar's whisky collection
Murdo MacLeod2/5The Boot Room
Murdo MacLeod3/5Fatima, Gleneagles' resident golden eagle
Murdo MacLeod4/5A big gold bath
Murdo MacLeod5/5Linkman Ian Crawford
