Since the summer of 1868, Dunmoraygrand has crowned the wooded ridge above Craigburn Wells — a gilded confection of ballrooms, gaming salons and thermal baths where the well-heeled of two centuries have come to take the waters and try their fortune. This is the story of the house, its floor and its rooms.
Dunmoraygrand rose during the great spa boom of the 1860s, when railway lines first threaded the Borders and Craigburn Wells transformed almost overnight from a huddle of drovers' cottages into a fashionable watering-place. Word of the town's iron-rich chalybeate springs had reached Edinburgh and beyond, and the promoters of the Dunmoray Estate resolved that visitors of quality should have somewhere of quality to stay.
What they built was extravagant even by the standards of the age. The architect, a young admirer of the French seaside casinos, gave the Grand a wedding-cake facade of honey-coloured sandstone, a soaring iron-and-glass Winter Garden, and a domed rotunda whose ceiling was painted with a night sky of gilded constellations. Gas jets by the thousand once lit the terraces; today the same halls glow with restored chandeliers of Bohemian crystal, their light pooling on parquet worn smooth by a hundred and fifty seasons of dancing feet.
The house has always kept two faces. By day it is a spa — a place of steam, colonnades and quiet reading rooms, where guests wrap themselves in linen and drink the famous waters from little engraved glasses. By dusk it becomes something else entirely: the lamps are turned up, the orchestra tunes in the gallery, and the doors to the gaming salons are drawn back to reveal green baize, polished mahogany and the soft, unmistakable clatter of the wheel.
Restored across a decade of patient work, the Grand today balances its antique bones against modern comfort. The plasterwork peacocks above the staircase have been re-gilded leaf by leaf; the original brass lift, its cage a filigree of oak and iron, still sighs its way between floors. Members and hotel guests move between the baths, the dining rooms and the salons as their forebears did, along corridors hung with portraits of the horses, hostesses and high-rollers who made the place a legend.
The gaming rooms occupy the eastern wing, arranged as a suite of three connected salons that grow grander as you move inward. Play is conducted with the unhurried formality the house is known for — croupiers in claret waistcoats, chips of mother-of-pearl weight, and a hush broken only by the call of the table.
The heart of the floor, panelled in the timber that gives it its name. Here stand the two great roulette wheels, each hand-balanced and spun on a brass spindle older than the room. Around them cluster the card tables — blackjack, baccarat and the house's beloved chemin de fer, dealt from a shoe of tortoiseshell inlay.
Under the glass dome, amid palms and orange trees, a smaller ring of tables caters to guests who prefer their play with a view of the terrace lamps. It is the most photographed corner of the Grand, and on gala nights the orchestra plays close enough that the wheel seems to spin in waltz-time.
Beyond the card salons runs the Long Gallery, once a promenade for taking exercise in poor weather and now home to the house's mechanical amusements. The original penny-in-the-slot machines of the Edwardian era — brass, glass-fronted and jangling — are preserved in cases along one wall as museum pieces, while their modern descendants line the gallery in tidy rows beneath the cornices. This is the informal, sociable end of the floor: no dress code beyond neatness, no minimums, and a well-staffed bar at the far end serving the house cordials.
Ninety-one guest rooms and eleven suites occupy the upper floors, each one different, each one furnished from the estate's own workshops. The grandest, the Dunmoray Suite, keeps its original marble bath fed directly from the thermal spring — a small, warm luxury that has never gone out of fashion.
Two dining rooms serve the house. The Palm Court, beneath the Winter Garden dome, offers a changing menu of Borders lamb, sea trout and garden produce under a canopy of greenery. Below stairs, The Cellar is darker and more intimate — a low, vaulted room for late suppers, aged whisky and the sort of conversation that outlasts the candles.
The original bath house has been restored to full working order: a colonnaded pool of naturally warmed spring water, a suite of steam rooms lined in Delft tile, and treatment rooms where the old hydrotherapy rituals have been gently reimagined for modern guests. It remains, as it always was, the quiet centre of the house.
Between the baths and the ballroom lie the reading room, the billiard room and a long south-facing terrace where afternoon tea is laid whenever the weather permits. The Grand keeps its own gardens, too — four acres of clipped yew, gravel walks and a walled kitchen garden that supplies both dining rooms — so that a guest might, in a single day, swim in spring water, dine on what was picked that morning, and never once leave the estate.
Dunmoraygrand welcomes adults of 19 years and over to its gaming salons. Valid photographic identification is requested on entry, without exception. Gaming here is intended as one pleasure among many — a diversion to sit alongside the baths, the table and the gardens, never a pursuit to be chased.
The house asks every guest to play within comfortable limits, to set a budget before sitting down and to treat any money staked as the cost of an evening's entertainment rather than a means of profit. Our floor staff are trained to notice when enjoyment tips into something less happy, and guests may at any time ask the management to set personal limits or to arrange a period of self-exclusion from the salons. There is never any embarrassment in doing so; it is simply part of how a well-run house looks after the people in it.
If gambling is causing difficulty for you or for someone you care about, free and confidential help is available. Please reach out — support is closer than it feels:
Please gamble responsibly. Know your limits, take regular breaks, and never gamble with money you cannot afford to lose. When the fun stops, stop.