Seaton House Luxury Boutique Hotel To Open in 2025
- Safira Schiowitz
- Oct 31, 2024
- 2 min read
A luxury boutique hotel called Seaton House is set to open in early 2025, rebranded from the Scores Hotel which closed in 2021. Located near the first tee of the Old Course, Seaton House will boast 42 bedrooms including five suites and three junior suites. It will also feature a fine-dining restaurant, Ondine St Andrews, run by Scottish chef Roy Brett of Ondine Oyster & Grill in Edinburgh, as well as an all-day restaurant, lounge, and bar.
The companies organising the rebrand are US-based Links Collection and Valor Hospitality Partners. Links Collection also owns Dunvegan Hotel in St Andrews. Spokespeople from both companies expressed a desire to support the St Andrews community in their comments for a Boutique Hotelier article, saying that restoring the building’s original name from the 1860s represents a “commitment to preserving a cherished piece of the town’s history.” Additionally, both Boutique Hotelier and The Courier wrote that Seaton House will create more than 60 jobs.
The Courier also recently reported that, ever since the announcement of the closure of New Picture House Cinema for the development of luxury sports bar T-Squared Social, there has been a growing concern among some St Andrews residents that the town is being overrun by students and tourists. On the other hand, some believe students and tourists are crucial parts of the local economy. The opening of new luxury hotels such as Seaton House spotlights both sides of the debate.
The two companies behind Seaton House are keen to quickly integrate the hotel into St Andrews. Jonathan Harper, managing partner of the Links Collection, told Boutique Hotelier: “We are humbled and honoured to have the opportunity to be a small part of the St Andrews community and to breathe new life into this historic property.” Valor Hospitality Partners’s global co-founder and chief executive officer Euan McGlashan added, “The town of St Andrews has been supportive all along and we are eager to make the local residents very proud of Seaton House.”
Photo by Madeleine Rea
Safira, your article is vividly written, but the location for Seaton House still feels questionable: there’s awkward construction nearby, the landscape is uneven, and that hardly gives guests a sense of premium comfort at £400 a night. In the US I saw a similar case in Austin where a hotel with a $28M budget lost nearly 10% of its market value because of a miscalculation with uneven terrain. Without the clear-eyed input of specialists, projects like this quickly slide into disputes, and that’s exactly why I find the practice of construction expert witness on such developments so relevant. Tell me, did the investors actually budget for fixing these distortions, or did they just decide to overlook the terrain?