The feeling of a family home pervades this hotel in brimming gardens on the edge of the Cairngorms national park. Bequeathed to the MacRobert Trust, the house was originally bought as a holiday retreat by Sir Alexander MacRobert, who transformed it in the Scottish Revival style. Lovely Edwardian interiors are filled with possessions and children’s portraits. Spacious bedrooms have period furnishings. More eclectic rooms are in cottages and apartments. There is a health club, a tennis court, children’s play park, and croquet on an infinity lawn. Trusted readers found their ground-floor apartment room ‘excellent for dogs, with a good drying porch and well-designed shower room’. Afternoon tea in the bar brought ‘tempting sweet flans’, while in the conservatory restaurant, David Butters’s use of local and home-grown ingredients, in such dishes as venison loin with poached brambles and beetroot jus, was ‘absolutely first rate – each course mouth-watering’. But ‘beware the muzak!’ Breakfast brings organic porridge with crystallised pistachios, lime honey and crème fraîche, peat-smoked haddock and a full vegan.