BOATH HOUSE

CHRISTABEL STEWART

Jonny Gent’s self-described sanctuary in the Highlands is a welcome escape for urban creatives.

“We wanted a space for people to vanish,” artist Jonathan Gent recently told the Financial Times. The result is Boath House, a unique hotel on Scotland’s northern coast, near Findhorn Bay. A reachable retreat, it is a haven away from urban bustle with ten sensitively renovated bedrooms, a 400-year-old-walled garden, a restaurant, store, and studio with a cabin and sauna. It also has a creative residency programme and curated shows. Everything offered is more than palliative and allows guests to relax completely in a creative space that encourages more creativity. (Guests can help out in the garden or turn their hand to pickling if they wish.)

Gent has long appeared to be searching for either connection or escape – he says he has had 40 different studios around the world – and, while attracting artistic, critical and institutional support, often seems happiest when going his own way. He is a master of connecting his own intuition, works and survival with what other people most want, creating cultural connections, escape, love, desire, a room, a dinner, a picture, a text written over a well-loved book – as the immediate success of his Sessions Art Club restaurant and “urban sanctuary” in Clerkenwell has shown. Boath House is a refuge for creatives and anyone escaping the pressures of the world, but it is more than that. Thanks to the beauty of the landscapes and the imagination of Gent and his partners, it offers, as he says, “a portal to another world”. ◉

The Dining Series, 2021. Works on paper at Sessions Arts Club. Courtesy Jonny Gent

Gent’s studio, Sessions Arts Club. Courtesy Jonny Gent

Gent’s The Omani Thobe studio apparel, 2015. Courtesy Jonny Gent