16-06-2025
The new Scottish hotel where you can buy everything in your room
When Annabelle Holland and her investment banker husband Anthony Everard decided during lockdown to start a business selling British-made furniture of their own design, the one thing they knew, she says, is that they didn't want a shop.
Having always won her interiors projects by word of mouth — 'by people seeing houses I'd done and then asking me to do theirs' — the best way, they decided, to persuade clients to invest in her modern country-house look, and the products they sold through their online interiors store Anbôise, was to let them experience it. Or, even better, to get them to stay in rooms she'd decorated, to eat off plates she'd picked and to use napkins whose embroidery she'd designed.
Which is why last month the British couple opened a hotel in which every inch has been designed by her and every room furnished with pieces from their Anbôise collection.
Situated at the foot of the long Glen Lyon in Perthshire (near the 3,000-year-old Fortingall Yew, which many believe to be one of the oldest trees in Europe), the Fortingall Hotel was put up for sale in 2022. When, in 2024, their friend Charlie Ramsay, who is the majority shareholder of the South Chesthill estate on which the hotel sits, told the couple about the sale, 'a lightbulb went off', Holland says. 'We'd always thought the best way to sell products was not through shops but a hotel — so you could sleep in it and feel it and then think, 'I want to buy it',' she says. 'While we had not necessarily considered Scotland, it felt like an opportunity we couldn't let go of.'
Having designed grand country houses for friends in the south of England, including a Georgian-style home with a kitchen designed to look like a farmhouse barn, transforming the run-down grade B listed hotel and adjoining pub was 'pretty straightforward', the 44-year-old English designer says. That was, primarily, because 'almost everything needed modernising if we were to run it as an upmarket hotel. So we pretty much stripped it.'
Between November 2024 and April 2025, they got a team of local builders in to remove the electrics, the plumbing ('including old macerator loos which you could hear three rooms away'), the dark red-painted interiors and the tartan carpets. Then, with the help of her husband — who is not just the business brains, she says, but 'has an incredible eye for detail' — they furnished the ten-bedroom double-storey, from top to bottom, with their own Anbôise products, from one-off antiques to rugs and tables designed by them.
To say the Fortingall Hotel, which was built in 1891 as an Arts and Crafts property, has been transformed is an understatement. Gone are the dark traditional rooms with their heavy Victorian pieces. In their place are interiors that wouldn't look out of place in a contemporary country house. Walls are painted in natural tones and sunny yellows. Headboards, in warm apricots and moss greens, are sensuous and covered in smartly piped velvets (£1,200). There are angled brass reading lights (£198) and elegant modern ceramic lamps (£210), sweet colourful glass vases (£28) and benches in pretty linen upholstery (£2,530). Plus, Holland has placed antiques which she's bought and refurbished, or solid-wood pieces they've designed for their own furniture range. All of which — from the beds, the baths and the rugs to the lampshades — can be bought.
Although all sales, she insist, will be totally discreet; prices will be listed on the room's TV, and QR codes available at reception. 'Then, if you want something, you can just go online, pay for it, and we can deliver to your home the next day,' she says. 'Put it this way — you're not going to have a sales catalogue thrust at you while you eat your lunch!'
Those who have no interest in interiors will be equally well catered to, she insists. Her husband has employed a professional team — all Scottish — to deliver a high-end menu using ingredients from the estate and region. They have a new team of eight to ensure the experience is as polished as the interiors.
In fact, so confident are they of their first Anbôise hotel that in November they moved to Sotogrande in Spain, and are working remotely. From there, she says, they have big expansion plans for the brand: to create their own fabrics and wallpapers and to grow the range of covetable products — which already include hand-painted pottery from Ireland, a carved amber jug and a pale-pink stone cake stand, rainbow-shaped white marble bookends and curvaceous rattan lamp bases. Not everything, she says regretfully, is made in the UK (although the furniture is) 'or we would source it all there — we learnt that lesson during Covid when everything was held up at Customs'.
For those wanting to redecorate their home, but who are unsure how to do it, Fortingall might be a rather lovely place in which to find inspiration. Checking into a little hotel in one of the most beautiful glens in Scotland, and walking the hills, fly-fishing along the estate's six-mile stretch of river and warming up with a wee dram certainly beats a weekend at B&Q.
Doubles from £270 to £485 a night,
