Why Every Design Lover Needs to Book a Trip to Scotland's Famed Whisky Region

I arrive expecting tartans, pipes, and single malts. I discover antler candelabra, couture kilts, and bud vases hand-turned from sweet chestnut, walnut, and yew. I presume a glorious, fixed tradition will greet me on a recent trip to Scotland; instead, I step into a vibrant, evolving world of craft.

My journey is into the country northeast heart: the river-threaded valleys of the Speyside whisky region and the neighboring heather-studded slopes of the Cairngorms and Grampians. As I travel from distillery to distillery, from workshop to atelier, from reimagined country house hotel to design-intensive shop, I witness a fascinating, very Scottish conversation of the maker with the material. And I learn that while bursting a new bloom today, that conversation has marked the local approach to land, water, tools, wood, textiles, furniture, and yes, distilling for centuries.

“Scots have a deep-rooted sensibility of material power and potential that goes far beyond simple resourcefulness,” Hugo Macdonald tells me. Macdonald is a design writer, curator, and—an amazing discovery I make on our first day together—heir to the high chieftainship of the Macdonald clan (which in my mind adds a mist-cloaked gravitas to his bona fides). But perhaps more to the point, he’s also the cofounder with his husband, James Stevens, of Bard, a new and stunning gallery of contemporary Scottish crafts in Edinburgh. On this trip, he’s bespectacled, youthful Virgil to my inquiring Dante.

I’m in good hands. We pass an afternoon at Tor Workshop and Whisky Room (a brilliantly Scottish hybrid) in the Cairngorms village of Braemar. We admire a tray of local whiskies and chat with Tom Addy, who opened the shop with his brother Ben as a creative extension of the renovations Ben oversaw at the Fife Arms, a Victorian hotel whose canny redesign brought traditional tropes into artful, modern maximalism. The Fife Arms is a design-loving traveler’s magnet. It’s also right across the narrow main street of Braemar.

“After all the work on the Fife Arms, I really wanted to do something with my hands,” Addy says. “So instead of making houses, I made tables and chairs.” Chairs indeed. Command-ing—literally—his sunlit shop is the high-backed, throne-like Isolation chair, Addy’s reimagination of 19th-century Scottish vernacular furniture designed to cocoon its sitter away from nasty drafts.

A bravura collector’s prize, the chair is nonetheless in perfect ideological company with more attainable pieces at Tor: all handcrafted from Scottish hardwoods that are already fallen, in forms and scale for modern lives. From dining chairs, sideboards, benches, stools, and side tables to turned lamps and bud vases, it’s possible to feel, as Macdonald says later, today’s Scottish craft impulse “to look back to look forward.”

There are so many examples. Right here in Braemar, architect and jeweler Naomi McIntosh has also turned, like Addy, to wood—cutting with lasers and bending with steam to create sculptural design forms for the home and as jewelry. Nearby artist Gareth McLean has created show-stealing candelabra from red and roe deer antlers, responsibly sourced, of course, and sometimes collected from local estates (Macdonald has curated tabletop versions at Bard).

To the north in the town of Forest, Acme Atelier’s Andrea Chappell is, as Macdonald says, “exploring—and exploding—what a kilt can be.” Her bespoke kilts in eye- and mind-popping deadstock and vintage fabrics hand-stitched with classic tartans and heritage tweeds are thrilling modern heirlooms capturing the attention of museum curators (she’s part of the V&A Dundee’s landmark Tartan exhibition this year). Very near Acme lies Boath House, a Georgian mansion now revived with near-monastic interiors as intoxicating as, well, all this whisky up here.

It’s fitting that Macdonald and I spend another afternoon taking in the intense crafting that supports Speyside’s grand whisky tradition currently plied by a remarkable 51 distilleries in the region. We visit Cambus Cooperage and marvel at how artisans wield tools largely unchanged for centuries to assemble the barrels where whiskies age and acquire their singular flavors. We spend time with the coppersmiths who hammer out the massive, gleaming stills where the complex alchemy of distillation happens. And we gaze in disbelief at the six interconnected stills—by far the most complex engineered system in the region—at Mortlach Distillery in tiny Dufftown.

When we sip a Mortlach 20-year single malt later that evening, we can feel the Scottish power of craft at work. “Craft, design, and industry were merging in the early days of whisky making in the 1820s,” Macdonald says. “We’re at a similar bridge in history today as makers, designers, and architects grapple with these times of great flux. We’re all questioning what we might learn from the past to help us build our future.”

I feel the lesson take hold, and it all makes beautiful sense. And I yearn to scoop up every newly crafted thing I’ve encountered and steal them all back home. To embrace this modern Scotland that embraces both its past and its future, that loves its materials and crafts them beyond compare.

No offense, tartan.

Featured in our September/October 2023 issue.

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