Best hotels in Edinburgh | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

Welcome to PressBeyond, the ultimate curated visual guide for design-driven hotels! My name is Will Miller and these are my recommendations for the best boutique and luxury hotels in Edinburgh.

I am the founder of PressBeyond and I am an ultra-meticulous hotel curator who loves clean visuals. I have individually analyzed and tiered each hotel included in this guide based on a variety of criteria (architecture & design, location, brand & brand affiliation, existing reviews, and my own personal experiences), and importantly, I have hand-selected the leading imagery for each hotel to provide you with easily-digestible, yet detailed and complete, like-for-like, high-level visual profiles. I felt this summarization step was a critical missing piece across existing guides, blogs, and booking platforms. My aim is to make it easier for people to identify hotel environments that resonate with them, along with enabling them to visualize the types of social experiences that those environments help foster. My brain doesn't work when exposed to cluttered content, so my goal was to create the opposite.

Underneath this, we are also a full booking engine offering 5% Venmo cash back along with other exclusive perks. For all of you design-obsessed hotel enthusiasts out there, I hope this guide helps get you to where you see yourself!

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Edinburgh

Edinburgh's schism between Old Town and New Town is one of Europe's most legible urban arguments — medieval tenement geology on one side, Georgian grid rationalism on the other — and the city's hotels have largely chosen a side. In the Old Town, The Scotsman occupies the former headquarters of the newspaper of the same name, a Edwardian baronial building on North Bridge whose editorial grandeur survives in the marble staircase and the old press hall reimagined as a swimming pool. A few minutes south, Prestonfield House sits outside the city's sandstone core entirely, a 17th-century country house marooned in parkland beneath Arthur's Seat, its interiors draped in silk and taxidermy with a theatricality that owes something to its long association with the restaurateur James Thomson. The W Edinburgh, by contrast, occupies the St James Quarter development — a contested regeneration project by architect Allan Murray that replaced a failed 1960s shopping complex — and reads as the city's most deliberate provocation: a curved, bronze-clad structure that makes no apologies for being contemporary and none for being loud. The New Town and its immediate neighbors offer a more composed kind of ambition. The Balmoral, a Rocco Forte property anchoring the east end of Princes Street since 1902, is one of the genuinely load-bearing landmarks of Scottish hospitality — its clocktower kept two minutes fast so travelers don't miss their trains at Waverley below. Gleneagles Townhouse, opened in 2022 on St. Andrew Square, is the Edinburgh outpost of the Perthshire resort, occupying a Georgian townhouse with interiors by Ennismore's in-house studio that balance tartan restraint with something more knowing. Nearby, The Bonham in the West End and The Roseate Edinburgh in West Coates work at a smaller register — Victorian townhouses with considered interiors that suit travelers for whom anonymity and neighborhood texture matter more than address. The Waldorf Astoria Edinburgh, known to most as the Caledonian, sits at the west end of Princes Street in a former railway terminus building, its Edwardian brick holding down a corner that has changed considerably around it. The Hoxton's Haymarket arrival brought a less ceremonial energy — its design-forward, value-calibrated approach fits the neighborhood's transitional identity between the West End and the city's newer creative geography. Virgin Hotels Edinburgh, in a former government building near the Royal Mile, completes a picture of a city that is genuinely plural in its hospitality: willing to house both the baronial and the boutique, the heritage object and the developer's gamble, often within a few minutes' walk.

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The Hoxton, Edinburgh

Edinburgh • Haymarket • OPTIMIZE

avg. $213 / night

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ALL - Accor property

The Hoxton, Edinburgh Design Editorial

Eleven Grade B listed Georgian townhouses, stitched together across both sides of Grosvenor Street in Edinburgh's Haymarket district, form the bones of The Hoxton, Edinburgh, which arrived in 2025 as one of the more architecturally ambitious entries in the brand's portfolio. The pale ashlar facade — its sash windows and classical cornicing intact — gives little away from the street, the only hint at transformation being the sharp black-framed canopy above the entrance. Inside, AIME Studios, Ennismore's in-house design team, worked carefully around the double-height ceilings and ornate period detailing rather than against them, threading a contemporary palette of deep teal, dusty rose, and warm brass through rooms that the Georgian bones keep from ever feeling frivolous. Across 214 rooms spread through nine categories, the interiors carry the atmosphere of a well-curated private flat rather than a corporate hotel conversion — scalloped headboards in crimson velvet, arch-framed floor mirrors in burnished gold, and pairs of moss-green armchairs positioned as though someone actually lives here. The restaurant takes a sharper turn: copper-lacquered ceilings, dusty-pink arched shelving lined with decorative plates, rattan bistro chairs, and lemon trees conjure a Mediterranean trattoria with enough theatrical confidence to feel like its own destination. The lobby café, with its checkerboard floor, marble-topped rounds, and pleated pendant lights, lands closer to a Parisian brasserie. Together the spaces make a case for contrast as a design strategy rather than an indulgence.

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The Scotsman

Edinburgh • Old Town • SPLURGE

avg. $409 / night

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The Scotsman Design Editorial

For over a century, the building at the corner of North Bridge and Market Street served as the headquarters of The Scotsman newspaper — one of Britain's most distinguished broadsheets — before its conversion into The Scotsman Hotel in 2001. Designed by J. Dunn in 1905 in an exuberant Scottish Baronial style, the sandstone facade presents stepped crow-step gables, carved heraldic stonework, and rusticated arched entrances that anchor the building emphatically to Edinburgh's skyline at the top of the Old Town ridge. The transformation into a 69-room hotel preserved the original marble-columned banking hall, visible in the images as a double-height atrium of breathtaking civic confidence — verde antico marble pilasters, wrought-iron balconies trailing greenery, Thonet bentwood chairs grouped around travertine cafe tables beneath a crystal chandelier of considerable scale. The guest rooms work in deliberate counterpoint to that grandeur. Bleached oak panelling runs floor to ceiling, echoing the original woodwork found throughout the building while translating it into something quieter and more contemporary — pale sage ceilings, waffle-weave throws in dove grey, upholstered tub chairs in oatmeal linen. The Scotsman Suite retains some of the building's original editorial offices. In the dining room, full-height oak panelling continues the material conversation, chandelier clusters overhead while barrel chairs in forest green, slate blue, and aubergine velvet introduce warmth and colour against the neutral ground — a calibrated balance between institutional heritage and liveable comfort.

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Virgin Hotels Edinburgh

Edinburgh • Old Town • SPLURGE

avg. $423 / night

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Virgin Hotels Edinburgh Design Editorial

India Buildings, a Category A listed commercial block on Victoria Street in Edinburgh's Old Town, was completed in 1932 to designs by architects Sydney Mitchell and Wilson in a robust Scottish Renaissance style — sandstone facades articulated with arched window surrounds, carved heraldic detailing, and a streetline that holds its own against the medieval tenements climbing toward the castle. Virgin Hotels Edinburgh, which opened in 2021 after a substantial conversion by local practice 3DReid, pressed 222 rooms into this civic-scaled shell without obscuring the bones of what was already there. The interiors move between two registers that rarely clash. Guestrooms handled by Graven Images work in bleached oak panelling, tufted velvet headboards in oatmeal, and terrazzo nightstands, the plasterwork cornicing original to the building left fully intact above it all — a black-and-white photograph of Highland dancers providing the sole gesture toward Scottish identity, which feels precisely right. Downstairs the contrast sharpens: the whisky bar, Commons Club, keeps the original warm-toned timber panelling and a white marble fireplace, layering in burgundy leather bar stools, globe pendant clusters, and a rolling library ladder against bottle-lined shelves, while the restaurant takes a wholly different direction — exposed ducting, reclaimed brick-pattern flooring, teal velvet dining chairs, and terracotta bar millwork delivering something closer to a confident European brasserie than anything anchored to its postcode.

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The Roseate Edinburgh

Edinburgh • West Coates • SPLURGE

avg. $428 / night

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Hilton Honors™ property

The Roseate Edinburgh Design Editorial

Scottish baronial sandstone on West Coates — crow-stepped gables, projecting bay windows, and the kind of steeply pitched slate roof that Edinburgh's prosperous Victorian merchant class used to signal permanence — gives The Roseate Edinburgh a structural confidence that most boutique hotels have to manufacture from scratch. The late-nineteenth-century villa, set back from the street behind a garden of clipped box spheres and massed herbaceous planting, arrived with its proportions already solved: high ceilings articulated by deep plaster cornicing, original cast-iron fireplaces intact in the principal rooms, and bay windows that push generous light into spaces that might otherwise feel heavy with period detail. The interiors work with that inheritance rather than against it. Bedrooms layer deep-buttoned headboards in navy velvet or sage tweed against William Morris-adjacent wallpapers, Persian rugs anchoring the parquet floors, with freestanding slipper baths positioned in the bay windows where they catch the outlook over the neighbourhood's sandstone rooflines — a placement that turns a bathroom fixture into the best seat in the room. The bar is painted in near-black navy, Victorian panelling and an ornate cast-iron fireplace held in the darkness while mustard velvet tub chairs and a warm-toned mahogany counter pull the temperature back toward conviviality. The restaurant takes a lighter touch, cream walls and tweed banquette seating beneath gilded drum pendants, the effect closer to a well-loved dining room than a formal hotel restaurant.

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The Bonham

Edinburgh • West End • SPLURGE

avg. $428 / night

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The Bonham Design Editorial

Three late-Victorian townhouses on Drumsheugh Gardens, their Craigleith sandstone facades still carrying the original Corinthian-pilastered bay windows and wrought-iron railings, were joined together to create The Bonham when the property opened in 1998 as part of the Town House Company collection. The address sits at the quieter, residential edge of Edinburgh's West End, far enough from the Royal Mile to feel like a discovery rather than a convenience, the New Town grid giving way here to the more generous plots and grander domestic scale of the city's late-nineteenth-century expansion. Inside, the interiors navigate a careful tension between the building's Victorian bones and something warmer and more deliberately styled. The public rooms carry the greatest conviction: the bar set within one of those projecting bays deploys crimson leather wing chairs, teal velvet tub seats, Persian rugs, and a dark marble and brass counter against walls hung in jewel-toned damask, the whole effect closer to a Parisian brasserie than a Scottish club. The restaurant shares the same vocabulary — oak panelling, herringbone parquet inlaid with a geometric carpet runner, aubergine velvet dining chairs with brass nailhead trim, a crystal chandelier suspended above the bay window. Guest rooms are quieter in register, dressed in silvered damask wallpapers, button-tufted leather headboards, and teal-upholstered armchairs positioned to catch the light from the original sash windows.

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Prestonfield House

Edinburgh • Prestonfield • SPLURGE

avg. $572 / night

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Prestonfield House Design Editorial

Designed in 1687 by Sir William Bruce — the architect responsible for the Palace of Holyroodhouse — the pink harled manor at the foot of Arthur's Seat has functioned as a private house, a diplomatic residence, and now, in its most theatrically realized incarnation, Prestonfield House. James Thomson, who transformed the property into a hotel in the 1990s and has continued layering it ever since, has made accumulation itself the design philosophy: every room is a deliberate act of excess, and the effect is closer to entering a collector's private obsession than checking into a Scottish country house hotel. The interiors reward sustained attention. A drawing room hung with plasterwork cherubs and crowded with striped sofas, carved oak side tables, and red pleated lamp shades sits alongside a panelled sitting room lined in what appears to be deeply lacquered leather or embossed wallcovering, its fireplace flanked by blue-and-white Kangxi-period ginger jars and Persian Heriz rugs underfoot. Bedrooms carry the same unrestrained commitment — one dominated by a dark walnut four-poster swathed in crimson silk damask with gold grotesque figures, another papered in cream-and-burgundy damask with a spiralled white column bed and a gilded wrought-iron console. Across the property's seventeen rooms, nothing coordinates in any conventional sense, yet the whole thing holds together through sheer conviction and the warmth of candlelight bouncing off centuries of accumulated gilt.

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Gleneagles Townhouse

Edinburgh • St. Andrew Square • OVER THE TOP

avg. $680 / night

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LHW Leaders Club property

Gleneagles Townhouse Design Editorial

Few buildings in Edinburgh carry quite so much institutional gravity as the former British Linen Company headquarters on St Andrew Square — a Category A listed palazzo whose rusticated sandstone facade, Corinthian columns, and roofline statuary belong to the civic vocabulary of a city that takes its neoclassical inheritance seriously. Gleneagles Townhouse, which opened here in 2022 following a five-year conversion by lead architect 3DReid and conservation specialist Simpson & Brown, transformed these adjoining listed buildings into 33 individually designed guest rooms without disturbing the bones that make the address remarkable. Ennismore Design Studio proved equal to the challenge of working within such loaded architecture. In the former banking hall, now a grand all-day restaurant, polished granite columns rise to an ornate gilded ceiling where portrait medallions and foliate plasterwork survive intact; against this, a central bar clad in warm burled wood and onyx marble feels theatrical without being irreverent. The guest rooms above work in a different register entirely — sage-green panelling, tented bed canopies in dusty rose and red trim, tufted olive velvet armchairs, and freestanding clawfoot baths visible through folding lacquered screens give each room the layered feeling of a very well-edited private flat. The rooftop bar, wrapped in banana-leaf palms and mirrored ceilings, shifts the tone again — a tropical non-sequitur perched above the New Town's stone geometry that somehow earns its place.

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The Balmoral, A Rocco Forte Hotel - Image 1

The Balmoral, A Rocco Forte Hotel - Image 2

The Balmoral, A Rocco Forte Hotel - Image 3

The Balmoral, A Rocco Forte Hotel

Edinburgh • New Town • OVER THE TOP

avg. $801 / night

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The Balmoral, A Rocco Forte Hotel Design Editorial

That clock runs three minutes fast — deliberately, so that travellers hurrying through Waverley Station below have always had a margin against the morning departure board. This single civic gesture captures everything about the building that became The Balmoral: a structure conceived in 1902 by architect William Hamilton Beattie as both railway hotel and Edinburgh landmark, its French Renaissance tower in Craigleith sandstone anchoring the eastern end of Princes Street with an authority that no subsequent building on that boulevard has managed to disturb. Rocco Forte Hotels has held the property since 1997, and the interiors carry the assured hand of Olga Polizzi, Forte's director of design and sister to Sir Rocco. Across 188 rooms and suites spread over seven floors, she works a palette of distinctly Scottish character without retreating into tartan cliché — the images reveal Cole & Son-style botanical wallpapers in sage and cream, upholstered headboards in deep aubergine damask with coordinating canopy treatments, and arched original windows left unobstructed to frame views directly across to Register House and the Georgian New Town beyond. The restaurant and bar spaces deploy dark-stained timber panelling, antique-mirrored screens, globe pendants on brass armatures, and richly patterned botanical wallcoverings that give the ground floor the warm, layered atmosphere of a well-furnished Edinburgh club — grounded and unhurried, entirely at ease with its own considerable age.

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W Edinburgh

Edinburgh • St James Quarter • SPLURGE

avg. $368 / night

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Marriott Bonvoy® property

W Edinburgh Design Editorial

Few buildings completed in Britain this century have announced themselves quite so brazenly as the coiled, copper-dark tower that crowns Edinburgh's St James Quarter development. Designed by BDP architects and developed by Nuveen Real Estate, the structure's spiralling ribbon facade — dark bronze cladding wrapping each floor in a continuous horizontal band, illuminated from beneath at night — sits in deliberate confrontation with the Georgian sandstone grid below. W Edinburgh, which opened in 2021 within this 12-storey form housing 244 rooms, makes no apology for the provocation. Interiors by Graven, the Glasgow-based studio, translate the city's geological and cultural character into a language the brand can carry. Guestrooms set copper pipe detailing and terrazzo bar surfaces against bold geometric ceiling planes — deep navy angles cutting across white — the effect somewhere between a rock climber's bothy and a fashion week set. Freestanding soaking tubs sit level with platform beds on rugs that burn with amber and violet. Higher up, the rooftop restaurant frames the Old Town skyline — castle, Balmoral clock tower, the spires of the New Town — through floor-to-ceiling glass, amber velvet banquettes and a mirrored ceiling holding the cityscape twice. The ground-floor bar leans into a warmer register: parquet floors, woven rattan chairs in a mid-century mould, chartreuse velvet ottomans, and textured ceramic tiles behind the counter in a palette of sage and clay.

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The Caledonian Edinburgh, Curio Collection by Hilton - Image 1

The Caledonian Edinburgh, Curio Collection by Hilton - Image 2

The Caledonian Edinburgh, Curio Collection by Hilton - Image 3

The Caledonian Edinburgh, Curio Collection by Hilton

Edinburgh • West End • OVER THE TOP

avg. $715 / night

Includes $38 / night in cash back

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Hilton Honors™ property

The Caledonian Edinburgh, Curio Collection by Hilton Design Editorial

At the western terminus of Princes Street, where Edinburgh's grandest thoroughfare meets the castle rock, a Edwardian sandstone railway hotel built in 1903 for the Caledonian Railway Company has outlasted the station it once served — the tracks long gone, the building immovable. Waldorf Astoria Edinburgh – The Caledonian, known locally as the Caley, was designed by architects Peddie and Forbes in a Flemish Renaissance manner, its warm pink Dumfriesshire sandstone contrasting with the grey ashlar of the New Town around it. The Saltire and Union Jack still fly from the columned entrance portico, exactly as they appear in these images, Edinburgh Castle visible on the volcanic crag directly behind. The 241 rooms carry a palette calibrated to their Edwardian bones — damask-patterned wallcoverings, heavily carved mahogany bed frames, tufted leather benches, and upholstered armchairs in deep teal and aubergine velvet set against plaid-carpeted floors that acknowledge the city without resorting to tartan pastiche. The suites run through generous interconnecting sequences, their proportions revealing the original railway hotel's ambition. The Pompadour by Galvin, the principal dining room, preserves its extraordinary plasterwork ceiling — rococo cartouches, floral swags, arched bays — now animated with de Gournay-style botanical wall panels and turquoise upholstered dining chairs that hold the room in productive tension with its Georgian inheritance.