How a Scottish microchain is reimagining some of the country's finest small hotels

The time is right to lower the tone a little. While much of central London is reopening after Lockdown 3.0, and the ghosts of city workers haunt countless doomed branches of Pret A Manger, all I’ve wanted recently is a nice plate of fish and chips. Away. A simple thing done well for a reasonable price that delivers all the dopamine.

Which is what Scottish hotelier Gordon Campbell Gray is doing, after buying out two of his favourite restaurants with rooms: The Three Chimneys on Skye and The Pierhouse Hotel in Argyll. Gordon’s first solo venture after selling his eponymous luxury hotel group is significant. He is a bellwether within hospitality, and this indicates a sea change in the industry towards a sort of post-Airbnb accessibility. It also helps that the more remote parts of Scotland are where everyone wants to be this year: all the wows of New Zealand but within reach.

While roaming the Highlands and Hebrides late last autumn, I had the displeasure of an aggressively early morning ferry that came with a significant silver lining. Breakfast was a bacon bap in the café on the boat – a small floury bomb of doughy white piggy bliss. It was so perfect I went back for another two. As a meal, it was impossible to “elevate”. A day later, I had the exact same thought about a plate of langoustines at The Pierhouse, the second hotel to join what will become a collection of six Scottish waterside properties as part of Campbell Gray’s Wee Hotel Company.

The Pierhouse is a long way from the hotels he has created before. Some of us remember evenings in the late 1990s at his Covent Garden hotel, One Aldwych, when it felt like the most modern place in Europe. It set a new pace for lobby bars in the city, arriving before Ian Schrager landed on St Martin’s Lane (obliterating the much-loved Café Pelican and debauched basement gay pub Brief Encounter that occupied the site previously). And when Campbell Gray opened Carlisle Bay on Antigua at the start of the century, it was a bold statement of new luxury, a thatch-free contemporary Caribbean pleasure palace. I remember visiting with a friend from New York who purred at me on the beach: “Some places look expensive, but this place feels expensive.” With the opening of Le Gray in Beirut in 2009, Gordon did more than anyone to reframe the city as a cosmopolitan bacchanal. It was one of my favourite hotels in the world, populated by fast friends. To see all of that destroyed in the explosion last August was tragic.

The sleepy little port of Appin in Argyll feels like it’s at the end of the earth. In a good way. Its Pierhouse Hotel started out life as a 19th-century home for the pier master and looks out over Loch Linnhe to Mull and Lismore. It is cute and comfortable, rather than fancy, and the food is the thing. Which all feels right, for right now. Like The Three Chimneys, which sits surrounded by dramatic landscapes and Disney wildlife on Loch Erghallan, the scenery is a huge sell. I arrived at The Pierhouse for dinner at sunset and made myself late for my table because I was transfixed by the horizon.

There were plenty of other great things inside, including fabulously greasy, double-cooked, skin-on chips, and oysters caught earlier that day – huge, plump and creamy. The Pierhouse is back to basics in its way, but what a way: the lobster, mussels, langoustines and oysters are listed on the menu with the names of their fisherfolk. Everything is sourced here, and cooked and served in an unfussy way. A few tweaks would make it perfect: the only fizz by the glass is prosecco, and café latte at breakfast is served in one of those tall glasses with a small handle near the base. Both are on my Won’t Do This list, along with standing up at gigs, liquorice and Ryanair flights. But after what we have been through in the past 14 months, cheap Italian fizz and anachronistic coffee vessels aren’t going to kill anyone.

Unlike, say, Schrager and his roll-out of Edition hotels in partnership with Marriott, there’s no corporate master plan here. Gordon bought both The Three Chimneys and The House Over-By (as its bedrooms are called) and The Pierhouse on something of a whim. Then, of course, had to close them down again for Lockdown 3.0. Their reopening this week comes with the customary Sturgeon-dictated restrictions: no indoor dining past 8pm for non-hotel guests, and alcohol only served to outdoor tables. All signs point to normality resuming on May 17.

Famed chef Shirley Spear sold The Three Chimneys to her friend Campbell Gray in 2019, and when he heard that the family who owned The Pierhouse were thinking of selling and moving south, he stepped up. He has a house overlooking Loch Etive 20 minutes away, and had been a regular for years. It was all on his doorstep.

While The Pierhouse is new to me, I’ve loved The Three Chimneys for years. Since I last visited, the restaurant interior has been brightened up. I preferred it a little dour – a better match for the capricious weather outside. But I will always have a lot of love for it. The character of the original croft house shines through, with the same rough whitewashed exterior as The Pierhouse. The six bedrooms and menu here are notably pricier than at its sibling; I’d go to Appin for lunch any day of the week, but four courses at The Three Chimneys come in at north of £70 before wine. It’s for birthdays and anniversaries.

The bedrooms are also more impressive than the crash pads attached to other remote fine dining rooms. The look is cool and slightly Scandi, with pale clapboard panelling and shearling textiles. The stained glass by local artist Diana Mackie in the reception entrance is a rare blast of colour, and a total joy.

I haven’t visited the restaurant here since Spear handed the kitchen over to chef Scott Davies in 2015. He’s still in situ, along with most of the regular staff, cooking with ingredients locally fished, shot and farmed, and some subtle Asian twists, including broths and tea served in cast-iron Japanese teapots. A petite pigeon pie with a gorgeous golden crust and sliced Skye deer on the side was one of the most powerfully flavoured, impressive things I’ve eaten this year, while a first course of Beijing pork in tea with squid and pork belly tasted sparkling bright. The attention to detail and execution is constantly impressive, although I long for a day without the performative Covid-era measures of cutlery delivered on ceramic plates, as if it had somehow arrived via sorcery, without human touch. This too will pass.

And the port at Appin and the landscape around Colbost on Skye will be as they always have been – elemental pleasures. They are what Gordon is all about for 2021: a great dinner, a good bed for the night and a transporting sunset over the water. I can’t wait to visit whatever he launches next.

The details

Rooms at The Pierhouse Hotel from £195 per night (01631 730302; pierhousehotel.co.uk); rooms at The Three Chimneys and The House Over-By from £365 per night (01470 511258; threechimneys.co.uk). For more ideas on where to stay, see our complete guide to the best hotels in Argyll.

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