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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