From the elegant drawing room to the spectacular bar, Cromlix House is dramatic, floral, and – crucially – comfortable
I have always been hopeless at flower arranging. At least, that’s what I thought until Kim Murray, wife of Andy, put me right at her gorgeous Scottish hotel. “You are a professional, right?” she asked me as she surveyed my haphazard but apparently successful creation during her masterclass.
What a compliment, but my triumph was purely down to my teacher. Passionate about growing and displaying flowers at her Surrey home as well as hand-tied gifts for her friends, Kim has a relaxed teaching style that matches her relaxed style of floristry: “First, I rampage through the garden with a pair of secateurs. Then I start with something structural, like a rose, and surround it with wafty stuff, not forgetting to add in a few taller stems.”
Kim may have zero formal training as a florist, but what she does have is an eye, in the same way that she has an eye for what is wanted from a country-house hotel these days. The natural arrangements of garden flowers at Cromlix, and the cuttings garden that she is creating with brilliant head gardener Sarah Janisch Corser, are both expressions of the current zeitgeist and part of the many changes that have swept through Cromlix since the Murrays decided to take over the management of their hotel themselves, reopening it earlier this year.
Andy Murray, son of Dunblane, bought Cromlix House in 2013. A hotel since the 1980s, this plain Victorian mansion with its own ornate chapel was where locals, including the Murray family, would come for special occasions. Jamie Murray married here in 2010, not long before the hotel, having fallen on hard times, shut its doors.