Spending the Night in a Scottish Castle
Like to live large? Rent a Scottish castle for a taste of grand hospitality.
"If you find yourself driving along the banks of Loch Ness, you have missed the driveway!"
Fortunately, the rest of the written directions that had preceded this warning were excellent, and I hadn't missed the lane I was looking for, near Inverness, almost four hours north of Edinburgh in the Scottish Highlands. After following the narrow tree-shadowed drive for several miles, as directed, I came to my destination: Dochfour, a three-story ocher house where the Baillie family has lived within sight of the famous loch since the 1400s. (They've been in Scotland even longer: Guy de Baliol came over from Normandy with William the Conqueror in 1066.)
Soon after I rang the bell, I heard Gina Baillie, the lady of the house, calling to me from behind her ten-foot-high front door. "Do you like dogs?" she shouted. "You do? Oh, good!" Whereupon Gina, who turned out to be dark-haired and quite beautiful and to look ten years younger than her age (around forty), swung back the heavy panel. Two Labradors bounded out, all tongues and tails and flying paws, followed by the largest dog I have ever seen, a Great Dane as big as, well, a great Dane. Happily, this four-legged Loch Ness monster proved to be as gentle in temperament as she was in name. "That's Portia," said Gina, introducing me to the giantess sweetly snuffling my shoulder.
Welcome to the world of Scottish castles and houses — and the world of Loyd & Townsend-Rose, a four-person Scottish firm that rents out sixty of the country's most impressive private residences, as well as a white-gloved handful of similar properties in England, Ireland and France. Want to take twenty members of your family on an exceptional holiday? Take the board of directors over for meetings and memorable golf? Host a group of friends for shooting or fishing? Want to settle into a turreted fortress overlooking ancient parkland or facing the open sea? For between $40,000 and $70,000 a week (food and staff included), Loyd & Townsend-Rose sees to it that every client's home is literally a castle, at least for a few nights.
If you so desire, the company can serve as a traditional upscale-tour operator. It designs custom itineraries for city and countryside during which guests stay at such fine hotels as the Howard, in Edinburgh, and Kinnaird, in Perthshire, as well as such private clubs as Skibo Castle, in the Highlands; it also provides expert guides for any number of activities and interests. Nor are these services limited to Scotland; for a wine-loving Texas billionaire and his wife, Loyd & Townsend-Rose recently arranged a four-day itinerary in Bordeaux that included numerous tastings at first- and second-growth châteaus in the company of the vineyards' aristocratic French owners.
But it is mostly the firm's roster of exceptional Scottish residences for rent that makes it notable. Nearly all are venerable, with the oldest going as far back as 1456. Many, though certainly not all, are on the large side — the very large side. "Sleeps eighteen" is a common phrase in the Loyd & Townsend-Rose catalogue, and "sleeps thirty-four" and even "sleeps forty" also appear. Some of the houses are occupied full-time by families whose ancestors built, bought or won them centuries ago; others are owned by absentee families who merely visit from time to time — as was the case at the Tower of Lethendy, another of the firm's properties I visited, two and a half hours south of Dochfour, in Perthshire. A renovated and expanded ("sleeps sixteen") hunting tower dating from 1456, Lethendy is owned by a Canadian family that rents it out ten times a year. Its fifty acres not only include a heated pool, formal gardens and a romantic woodland bower but also boast a six-hole golf course (played three ways, to make eighteen holes).
How visitors use the residences depends on their choice of places, pursuits and pleasurable company. At Dochfour, where a painting-lined gallery thirty feet long leads to a formal living room so spacious that the grand piano in a corner looks small, Gina Baillie and her husband, Alexander, take in guests "maybe four or five times a year. We mostly host groups of friends," says Gina, "who come for shooting or fishing on the property, or golfing nearby, so we put on quite organized activities and meals for them, often separate from ours. They stay on their own side of the house [there are nine guest bedrooms], so they don't have to see us at all. But, of course, if they want, they're welcome to mix in. We do have one older, frightfully grand woman who comes from New York by herself, and she likes dining with us and even gets down on the floor and plays with the children." In another age, another dowager loved visiting Dochfour and its five thousand acres, but it's hard to imagine Queen Victoria on the floor, playing with little Baillies past.
"Our forte is helping clients experience the real Scotland as opposed to the tourist Scotland," says Andrew Loyd, a founder of Loyd & Townsend-Rose, which has been based in the Borders region since 1999. "We give them access to the finest houses and gardens and, sometimes, even to meeting the people who live in them. By the end of their stay, they'll feel that they've genuinely gotten to know a bit of the country, perhaps made some friends."
Born into a well-connected military family — his father was a major in the Coldstream Guards and his grandfather a general of the regiment — Loyd opted for a different field of service: the hospitality industry. After a decade of working in management and taking care of guests at a succession of London's top hotels, including the Dorchester, the Connaught and Dukes, he switched roles and countries; for eight years he lived in the United States and ran the private properties and estates of, among others, a senior member of the Mellon banking family, a Wall Street tycoon and a famous international financier and philanthropist. Even for a worldly and charming Connaught graduate, working for America's Gulfstream set and making sure that their New York town houses were properly staffed and their Palm Beach mansions ready to receive was eye-opening. At least one time, Loyd received a figurative black eye, too. Though he would never name names, he does describe how one employer fired him for an (almost) amusing reason: at six-foot-three, Loyd was nearly a foot taller than his wee billionaire boss. "He didn't like having to look up at me," says Loyd, managing a civilized smile at the memory.
Today it's not bad manners, only well-bred manors, that occupies Loyd and his business partner, Jonathan Townsend-Rose, who trained as an agricultural agent and has extensive experience in helping landed families manage large estates. "The secret of making our business work is understanding what the high-worth traveler needs or will respond to," says Loyd. "For lots of extremely successful businesspeople, it's not a treat to stay in a hotel, even a really lovely one, for a long holiday. We do a limited number of bookings, work with a small number of properties, each of which I know personally, and basically do all-bespoke travel. You have to show clients a hidden side of the world that they can't easily visit otherwise; but that's what keeps it special."
Loyd & Townsend-Rose, 011-44-1573-229-797; ltr.co.uk.
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