Gleneagles Townhouse

Gleneagles Townhouse

On St Andrew Square, in the heart of Edinburgh's New Town, a UNESCO World Heritage site laid out by James Craig in the eighteenth century, Gleneagles Townhouse occupies 37 to 39 St Andrew Square, a Georgian mansion built in 1807 for the Eighth Earl of Dalhousie and sold that same year to the British Linen Company, which enlarged it in 1848 by acquiring two neighbouring townhouses and commissioning the sculptor Alexander Handyside Ritchie to add six Corinthian columns and six statues representing agriculture, commerce, science, architecture, manufacturing and navigation. The building served as a bank, latterly the Bank of Scotland, until the branch closed in 2008, and a five-year restoration led by architects 3DReid, with interiors by Ennismore Design Studio, reopened it in 2023 as the first city outpost of the Gleneagles Hotel, which had opened in the Perthshire countryside in 1924. The 33 rooms, no two alike in proportion, ceiling height or choice of antiques, are run as a townhouse extension of that Perthshire estate rather than a standalone city hotel. The ground floor was once the banking hall, and The Spence, the all-day restaurant led by Head Chef Jonny Wright, operates beneath its restored glass dome and stone columns, where the names of the bank's founding partners remain etched in gold along the cornice, and the menu, named for the old Scots word for larder, is built around Scottish produce and Wright's own return to the country after sixteen years away. Downstairs, the wellness suite is set into the old bank vaults, the original vault doors now serving as the entrance to the changing rooms, alongside a cryotherapy chamber and an infrared sauna. Upstairs, the rooftop bar Lamplighters looks over the Old Town on one side and the New Town on the other, and the members' club includes the Note Burning Room for breakfast meetings and brunches and the Telling Rooms for co-working. The extension at the rear uses Catcastle Buff sandstone, reclaimed West Highland slate and a copper cladding already weathering to bronze, chosen by 3DReid to read as new work rather than pastiche against the historic facade. Staying here means noticing how much of the old bank was left in place, not swept out for a fresher look: the stained glass window in reception, the war memorial to the sixty-eight bank employees killed in the First World War, the sweep of the original staircase and floor. It suits a guest who wants central Edinburgh without the tartan-shop version of the city, who will use the members' floors as much as the bedroom, and who is happy to arrive by train, since Waverley Station is a few minutes' walk and a taxi is rarely necessary. The all-day format of The Spence, open from Bloody Mary breakfasts through to dinner service, means the same room does most of the work across a stay, and the ground floor has the sociable, slightly loud energy of a members' club that is also a hotel lobby. You should not come if you want the 850 acres and grouse-moor scale of the original Gleneagles, or if you want a quiet ground floor, since the members' club keeps The Spence and the bars busy well into the evening, particularly Thursdays and Fridays. You should come for a serious Georgian building put to a serious second use, for a kitchen with a clear idea of what it is doing under Jonny Wright, and for a wellness floor housed, somewhat improbably, behind the vault doors of a two-hundred-year-old bank. The short version: A 33-room townhouse hotel in a former British Linen Company bank on Edinburgh's St Andrew Square, restored by 3DReid over five years, with a restaurant under the old banking hall's dome, a members' club and a wellness suite behind the original vault doors.