Gleneagles Townhouse: a bank on St Andrew Square, and the best breakfast room in Edinburgh

Gleneagles spent nearly a century as a railway hotel in Perthshire before deciding, in 2022, that it wanted a city address as well. What it took was the old British Linen Bank building on St Andrew Square, which is one of the handsomest interiors in the New Town and had spent years being a bank rather than anything anyone could walk into.

Thirty three rooms, a members' club, a rooftop and a restaurant, arranged inside a building that was never designed to hold any of them. The result is the most enjoyable hotel in Edinburgh, and the one that has changed the New Town most in a decade.

The Spence

Start here, because it is the room that justifies the building. The former main banking hall, under its original glass dome, now seats a hundred and twenty for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The proportions are enormous, the light through the dome at nine in the morning is extraordinary, and it is the best room in which to eat breakfast anywhere in Scotland.

The cooking is classics done properly rather than anything experimental, which is the correct decision in a room that is already doing the work. Take breakfast late and unhurried, and take it here rather than upstairs.

The rooms

Thirty three, and genuinely all different: different sizes, different ceiling heights, different plans, because a nineteenth century bank has no repeating floorplate. Original fireplaces and panelling survive in a good number of them, alongside stone columns, heavy cornicing and a collection of contemporary work by Scottish artists that is better than hotel art usually is.

That variety is the thing to plan around. The gap between the smallest and the largest at similar grades is real, and the suites on the upper floors looking over St Andrew Square are a different proposition to the interior rooms. Ask what you are getting, and ask for the square if the budget stretches.

The rooftop, and the members' club

The roof terrace is open to hotel guests and members and to nobody else, which is unusual in a city where every rooftop is a queue. The view runs across the New Town rooflines to the castle and the Old Town beyond, and at six in the evening in August it is the single best place in Edinburgh to be sitting down.

The members' club is the other half of the building, and staying here gives you the run of it: the lounge, the working spaces, the events. The practical effect is that the hotel has a life of its own rather than a lobby, and at nine o'clock you are among people who live here rather than among fellow guests.

Most city hotels borrow their atmosphere from the street outside. This one generates its own, which is why the locals come to it.

The position

St Andrew Square, which is the New Town at its best: Georgian, wide, and quiet after dark. Princes Street is two minutes, Waverley six, the Royal Mile about twelve on foot and uphill.

During the festival that twelve minutes is a genuine consideration, because the venues are in the Old Town and you will do that walk four times a day. It is the one respect in which the Balmoral has it beaten. Set against that, you sleep in a district the festival barely touches, which after a week matters more than the walk does.

Food and drink beyond The Spence

The lounge does a short menu all day and does it well, and the collaboration with Alby's, an Edinburgh sandwich shop with a genuine local following, is the sort of thing that only works when a hotel is confident enough not to insist on doing everything itself.

What the rate buys

Around three hundred and ninety five pounds outside the festival and six hundred and up through August. Against the Balmoral it is a hundred pounds cheaper for a hotel that is younger, smaller, more sociable and arguably better looking, and it gives up a spa, a swimming pool and eight minutes of walking to the Old Town.

For a long weekend, that trade is straightforwardly worth making. For a full fortnight with four shows a day, the Balmoral's position starts to earn its premium back.

The particulars

• Where: 39 St Andrew Square, New Town.
• Ask for: a room facing the square, and ask about ceiling height, which varies more than the grade suggests.
• Do not miss: breakfast under the dome, and the roof at six.
• Best for: a long weekend, and anyone who wants the hotel to be part of the evening.

How it compares for the Fringe is here.