Albamhor Treatment Rooms at The Fife Arms

The one thing

Bharti Kher made a work for these treatment rooms in 2018, three panels called CIPHER, built up out of bindis, and it hangs on the ground floor where guests arrive. Kher has described the piece as a time tunnel you can climb into, or a vortex, or a womb, or a safe hole. Very few spas anywhere have a commissioned work of that standing inside them, and fewer still put it where the robe comes on.

The verdict

The Fife Arms has been standing on the same corner of Braemar since 1856, when a Mr J. Hunter took an advertisement in the Aberdeen Journal to announce the opening of a first class hotel stocked with wines and spirits selected from the best firms. Queen Victoria used to stop here to change her horses on the way to Balmoral, ten miles up the road, and bowed to the crowd that gathered to watch her do it. The building was enlarged over nine years from 1897 by Alexander Marshall Mackenzie, by agreement with the Duke of Fife, and it is category B listed and looks it, all sash and case windows and a four storey west wing.

Then a long century happened. The War Office took the hotel over and housed army units in it, including the newly formed Commando Corps. Afterwards it slid into coach parties and one night stays, and by the turn of this century it was run down and in poor repair. Iwan and Manuela Wirth bought it in December 2014, spent four years and a great deal of money putting it back, and opened on St Andrew's Day 2018, to the village first and the rest of the world afterwards.

What came out of that is a hotel with more than sixteen thousand antiques, artworks and collectibles worked into it, which is what happens when the owners also founded Hauser and Wirth. There is a Picasso in the drawing room and a Lucian Freud in the lobby, a watercolour by Queen Victoria of a stag shot by John Brown, a ceiling hand painted by Zhang Enli, a chandelier by Subodh Gupta made of stainless steel utensils, and a Guillermo Kuitca mural in the dining room drawn from the flow of the Clunie river running past outside. Forty seven bedrooms, no two alike. A whisky bar with more than five hundred bottles arranged by flavour. A garden by Jinny Blom planted with Scots pine, downy birch, rowan, bog myrtle and Himalayan cowslip, running down to a wildflower meadow and a view to the Cairngorms.

The Albamhor Treatment Rooms opened last, in September 2019, nine months after everything else, with interiors by Russell Sage Studio drawn to match the coaching inn around them. They look out over that garden. The Michelin guide, writing about the hotel as a whole, notes that the spa is the only place in it approaching minimalism, which is a fair way of putting it and also a compliment.

The water

This needs saying plainly, because it shapes everything else. There is no swimming pool at The Fife Arms, and the hotel says so itself. There is no steam room, no hammam, no salt room, no hydrotherapy pool and no thermal circuit. The entire wet offer inside Albamhor is one sauna and a set of rainforest showers, complimentary before or after a treatment. The sauna was designed and installed by Spa Vision and the hotel calls it bespoke, and beyond that it does not elaborate.

For a house of this standing that is a real gap, and anyone coming for a long afternoon of heat should look elsewhere in Scotland. What The Fife Arms has done instead is push all of it outdoors, and the outdoor version is unusually good.

Three hours with Wild Braemar buys a wild swim in a Highland river and then a wood fired sauna built into a horse box overlooking a waterfall, finishing with a picnic or a dram in a bell tent, at five hundred pounds and upwards. There is guided wild swimming with open water qualified guides at two hundred and fifty for two hours. There is a standalone gym pod at the back of the hotel, open around the clock and free to residents, ten pounds an hour to anybody else. And there are ghillies, which is the Gaelic word for the Highland attendant who looked after guests on sporting expeditions, running walks through ancient Caledonian pine, fly fishing, pony picnics, foraging, e biking and a hunt for the dark sky. All of that is for residents only.

So the honest shape of it is this. Indoors, one sauna and showers. Outdoors, a river, a waterfall and a national park.

Treatments

The menu is small, current and better thought out than the room count would suggest. Four houses do the work: QMS Medicosmetics for clinical facials, Methode Physiodermie from Switzerland, ishga from the Outer Hebrides, and Moss of the Isles. Nails run on CND.

The Albamhor Signature Deluxe is the long one, two hours at three hundred and twenty pounds, and it moves through a seaweed and sea salt foot soak, a scrub, a seaweed gel mask, a marine back treatment, a full body massage, a facial and a scalp massage without ever feeling like a list. Below it the menu sits mostly between seventy five and two hundred and twenty pounds, with fifty five and eighty five minute options across the Moss of the Isles line and a Face and Body Experience at a hundred and fifty for the hour.

Three treatments say something about the house. The Walker's Wonder Leg Ritual, forty five minutes at a hundred and fifty pounds, was written for people coming down off a hill, which in Braemar is most of them. Tides of Change is a named menopause massage at eighty five minutes and two hundred pounds, worked with ishga muscle recovery oil and gua sha. And Nurturing Touch, fifty five minutes at a hundred and twenty five, is approved by the Standards Authority for Touch in Cancer Care, with the accreditation printed on the menu rather than mentioned if asked.

Alongside those there is pregnancy work from thirteen weeks, hot stone, reflexology at forty five or seventy five minutes, threading, and manicures and pedicures at seventy five pounds for the long version. Albamhor is also the hotel's own bath and body range, made from a macerate of herbs specific to this bit of Aberdeenshire including myrtle, yarrow, burdock, juniper, bell heather, thyme, valerian and rosemary, and it is what fills the bathrooms upstairs and the shelves in the shop.

Getting in

Treatments are booked by email to the spa or by telephone, and there is no online booking at all, which is either charming or annoying depending on the hour you are trying to book. Advance reservation is asked for, and non residents are taken but pay a fifty per cent deposit, so the door is open without being wide open. There is no spa day, no facility only pass and no package that bundles the rooms with lunch. A gift voucher for one treatment sells at a hundred and forty pounds.

Robes are provided and there is no need to arrive in one. The house line is that you come as you are and change in the privacy of the treatment room, which matches the rest of the hotel, where the dining rooms take you straight off the hill or dressed for an occasion without comment. Cancellation is twenty four hours.

Braemar sits inside the Cairngorms National Park with mountains on every side, and Balmoral is a fifteen minute drive. Aberdeen airport is somewhere around ninety minutes by road, Edinburgh a little over two hours, and there is no public transport link from either, so a car or an arranged transfer is the way in. Parking in the village is limited. The Braemar Gathering fills the place completely in early September, as it has since Victoria's day, and rooms go a long way ahead.

What to know before you fall in love

• There is no pool anywhere in the hotel, and no steam room, hammam or thermal circuit. Indoors, the whole heat offer is one sauna and showers.
• No spa day, no day pass and no facility only access exists, so a treatment is the only way into the rooms.
• Nothing is bookable online. It is email or telephone, and non residents pay a fifty per cent deposit.
• The good outdoor water, the wilderness sauna and the guided wild swimming, is published for residents only, so a day visit does not reach it.
• Dogs are welcome across much of the hotel but are not permitted in the treatment rooms.
• Opening hours for the rooms are not published, which is worth pinning down when you book.
• Braemar is genuinely remote and the weather turns fast, which is most of the charm and a real consideration for a short trip.

Best for

Anyone who wants a treatment at the end of a day spent outdoors rather than a day spent in a robe. Walkers and climbers, quite literally, since one treatment on the menu was written for their legs. People who care about art, because there is a serious collection here and a commissioned piece inside the spa itself. Anyone travelling for Balmoral, the Braemar Gathering or the Cairngorms who wants somewhere to be looked after afterwards. And anybody going through cancer treatment or the menopause who would rather see the right treatment printed on a menu with the accreditation beside it than have to ask.