The mastermind behind this reinvention is Patrick Colquhoun—son of the current chief of Clan Colquhoun (pronounced ka-hoon, for the uninitiated), the family that has held the surrounding 45,000-acre Luss Estate for more than 800 years—who enlisted the celebrated British interior designer Russell Sage to help breathe new life into the building. Sage is no stranger to high-end Scottish hospitality, having previously conjured the maximalist wonderland of The Fife Arms in Braemar, the whimsical, art-stuffed Victorian hotel backed by mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth.
Here, though, the brief was intentionally more modest. “I said right from the outset, it’s a coaching inn and it’s a pub—we’re not trying to be a five-star hotel,” Sage tells me. Colquhoun felt similarly, noting that while Scotland has seen plenty of big-budget luxury openings over the past decade, he wanted “an inn where the design, the food, and the welcome are taken as seriously as they would be in a grand hotel, but where you can still find yourself mixing with local residents.”
Photo: Courtesy of the Loch Lomond Arms
That sense of laid-back, unpretentious warmth was evident the moment I crossed the threshold. There is no formal reception desk; instead, I was greeted like an old pal by a member of the affable, mostly local team decked out in butterscotch yellow waistcoats, and ushered into the Map Room, a snug where pink velvet chairs and sturdy antique tables sit beneath a ceiling papered entirely in vintage hand-drawn charts inherited from Colquhoun’s grandfather. After a marathon journey involving three connecting flights to reach Glasgow—and coming off the back of a particularly hectic week that had left me feeling a little under the weather—the lack of fuss was firmly appreciated. Better still was what awaited upstairs when I was led to my bedroom: a golden dram of Scotch whisky and a plate of crumbly cheese straws laid out on a side table. I snacked on a straw and opened my window, plunking myself down onto the super-king four-poster bed to let the loch-side air work its magic. (By which I mean: I fell into a coma-like stupor.)
