Ardbeg House, Islay, Scotland, The Times and The Sunday Times Best Place to Stay in the UK and Scotland for 2026
Port Ellen has fewer than a thousand inhabitants, a post office, a distillery three miles down the road, and now the best hotel in Britain. That last part is not my assessment. It is The Times and The Sunday Times, who named Ardbeg House their overall Hotel of the Year for 2026 six months after it opened. Whether or not you put much stock in awards, the reasoning is hard to argue with.
From the outside, Ardbeg House gives nothing away. The building, formerly the Islay Hotel, keeps its whitewashed walls and four-pane windows in deference to the community that asked, pointedly, that the exterior remain unchanged. Port Ellen had already absorbed years of construction from two nearby distillery developments, and the new owners, the Glenmorangie Company, listened. What Russell Sage Studio did instead was pour everything inward.
The twelve rooms each carry a name and a story rooted in Ardbeg lore and Islay mythology. The Monster Room has a four-poster bed with metal serpents coiling down its posts and walls covered in Fromental crocodile-scaled wallpaper, a reference to the local legend of an alligator lurking off the southern shore. The Feis Room has a headboard fashioned from a grand piano, a nod to Islay's annual music and whisky festival. The Founder's Room honours the people who built Ardbeg, and its shower wall has a marble finish that, depending on your state of mind, resolves itself into the shape of a polar bear. Two miniatures of Ardbeg 10 are hidden somewhere in each room, their locations available as clues if you want them. There are no televisions. On a bad day with the Atlantic coming in sideways, this is either the best or worst detail about the place, depending on your temperament.
Ardbeg House
The restaurant is dark and unhurried, with a menu small enough to read twice. The shellfish lands on the dock a hundred yards from the kitchen and the hand-dived scallops, served with sea herbs and clams, are exactly what you want to eat on the southern coast of a Hebridean island. Bread is baked from grist milled at the distillery. Beef from Cornabus Farm is smoked for twelve hours over whisky staves from Ardbeg's own barrels. Venison pie and pistachio soufflé have both been singled out by guests. The menu changes with what arrives and what grows.
The Islay Bar takes its name from a long-closed local pub and was designed to serve both visitors and the people who live here, which matters. Ardbeg Wee Beastie is £3.50 a dram. The cocktail list, put together by Jason Scott of Bramble Bar and Mothership, tops out at £12 and most sit at £9. Badger Juice, a small-batch Ardbeg exclusive to the hotel, is poured daily at 18.15 from a hand-painted badger firkin; the name is an anagram and the recipe is known only to the distillery team. Above the bar, a fishing boat is suspended from the ceiling.
More than twenty Islay artists and makers contributed to the building: furniture from Port Ellen, textiles from Bowmore, ironwork from a blacksmith in Bruichladdich. A copper wall piece was cast from a retired Ardbeg still. An octopus chandelier hangs in the entrance. The whole thing is maximalist and specific and, somehow, coherent.
Getting here takes intent. The ferry from Kennacraig on the Kintyre peninsula is two hours on a good crossing. There are flights from Glasgow, twenty minutes, which is its own kind of surreal. By the time you arrive, the mainland has receded in a way that feels disproportionate to the distance. This is part of what you are paying for.