Scottish Serenade - 8
JA Mar Hall has 66 rooms and suites. Girlahead was in suite 4, one of two premium suites that can be joined together that are frequently used by big stars performing in Glasgow, only 25 minutes away. Look out into the well-manicured multi-level garden, above. Honestly, the suite, with soaring ceilings and enormous length and breadth proportions, couldn't really be called practical – it needed a lady’s maid, or butler, to carry necessities from one room to another. Enter, and there's a corridor to your right leading to the bathroom (lovely local Laura Thomas toiletries from North Berwick) and closet.
If you continue on, you do a couple of kinks and you get to the bedroom, which means that emergency visits to the toilet in the middle of the night are not feasible here. The bedroom is about five by five meters, and beyond the same depth, but three meters wider, is the living room, devoid of wallpaper. The bedroom’s paper is an overall pattern, mid-grey on paler grey, of twirling foliage with little birds, supporting three oil paintings, all with some mid-grey in them. The outline-only mid-wood four-poster bed has matching bedside tables with marble tops, like the coffee table. One challenge was the enormous carpet under and around the bed. It just would not keep flat – lady’s maid, where are you? All the furniture’s furnishing is what could be described as stretch plush, green for two low armchairs, sea blue for a three-seat sofa. There are plenty of sockets with USC ports, and the concierge quickly brought up an adapter that had both USB and USC (the entire mostly-young Scottish staff were really helpful throughout). Very heavy pull-across curtains, in same blue plush as upholstery, provided a good hand work out. The living room had a big bow window with a marble-topped round table and four paler blue plush chairs with extraordinary tiger and other animal curvilinear rears. A four-seat tomato plush sofa was complemented by a real leather armchair, a grand piano, and books on David Hockney, Keith Haring, and Glasgow.
This is the perfect hotel for the fit. You have 18 holes of Dave Thomas Jr golf, and an impressive gym and indoor pool. It’s also perfect for Scottish baronial eating and drinking, with splendidly ornate bars and a Dining Room with a soaring carved wood ceiling that is so heritage-protected lights are fixed to floor-set stands. The menu has a separate bold section for prime Perthshire beef, so after whisky-cured smoked salmon with strips of celeriac on top it had to be a fillet, 220-grams, dry-aged, simply grilled, with both fries (delicious) and thumb-sized hash brown sticks (ibid, with roast garlic mayonnaise. And braised cabbage and, to finish, a Tipsy Laird. Let no-one say Girlahead chickens out, especially in Scotland.
