The Old Course Hotel, St Andrews: the hotel golfers aim over

Built on the town’s old railway station and standing in the line of the most famous tee shot in golf, the Old Course Hotel is the grand address in St Andrews — for golfers, certainly, but also for anyone who likes a hot pool on a roof with the North Sea in front of it.

Built on the town's old railway station and standing in the line of the most famous tee shot in golf, the Old Course Hotel is the grand address in St Andrews — for golfers, certainly, but also for anyone who likes a hot pool on a roof with the North Sea in front of it.

Twice a day, if the wind is helping, you can stand at a west-facing window in the Old Course Hotel and watch a stranger aim a golf ball at you. The seventeenth on the Old Course, the Road Hole, asks players to hit their drive blind over the corner of the hotel grounds, over a replica of the old railway sheds that stood there before it, and to trust that the fairway is waiting on the far side. Most of the time it is. From the Road Hole Bar on the fourth floor you can watch them find out, with one of 293 whiskies in your hand.

That is the whole proposition, really. There are prettier hotels in Scotland and there are far older ones, but there is no other hotel anywhere that stands inside the geography of the game like this. The first tee is a five-minute walk along the Links. The West Sands, the beach from the opening of Chariots of Fire, is the same distance in the other direction. The town, with its three medieval streets and its ruined cathedral, is ten minutes on foot. You can arrive on the Wednesday, never get in a car, and leave on the Sunday having done everything St Andrews is for.

Why go

Because it is the address. St Andrews has a handful of very good hotels and several charming small ones, but when someone from Connecticut or Kuala Lumpur books "the hotel at St Andrews", this is the one they mean. It is a five-star with 175 rooms, which sounds large, and is, but the building is long and low and the rooms are spread along it so that it rarely feels busy outside the bar and the breakfast room. It has been owned since 2004 by Kohler, the American family company that makes the world's more expensive bathrooms, which explains why the bathrooms here are an event in themselves: deep baths, big rain showers, and in some suites lighting that changes colour with your mood, or the weather's.

The other reason is that it works for the person who does not play. Golf hotels tend to leave the non-golfer with a paperback and a long afternoon. Here that afternoon can be spent in a 2,300-square-metre spa, on a beach, in a town with a university older than most countries, or in one of five places to eat without leaving the building.

The room

Ask for an Old Course room or suite, on the west side. The windows run floor to ceiling and the view is the one on the postcards: the seventeenth fairway directly below, the Swilcan Bridge and the eighteenth beyond it, the stone bulk of the Royal and Ancient clubhouse, the spires of the town, and past all of it the grey-green line of the sea. It is a view that changes hourly. Early morning brings the greenkeepers and the first four-balls; the light in the evening comes in flat from the west and turns the whole course gold for twenty minutes before it goes. Eden rooms, on the other side of the building, look inland toward the estuary and the practice grounds, are quieter, and cost less; they are the right choice if you plan to be out all day.

The 2021 extension added 31 rooms and a penthouse, and the newer rooms are, as new rooms tend to be, a little more generous in their proportions. Throughout, the palette is restrained — tweeds, dark timber, brass — and the beds are the sort you plan your evening around.

The table

The Road Hole Restaurant, on the fourth floor, holds three AA rosettes and the best dining-room view in Fife: the same course and sea, seen through a wall of glass, with the lights of the town coming on as the main courses arrive. The cooking is modern Scottish and unshowy — East Neuk seafood, Perthshire game, Highland beef — and the sommelier knows the list. Next door, the Road Hole Bar is where the town's caddies, members and visiting professionals have been settling arguments for decades; the whisky list runs to those 293 bottles, 251 of them Scottish single malts, and the barmen will steer you kindly. Swilcan Loft, added in the extension, is the rooftop option for lunch and a lighter dinner. Hams Hame, on the ground floor by the course, does burgers and pints for people still in their spikes.

And then there is the Jigger Inn. It was the stationmaster's house when the trains still came, a whitewashed cottage from the 1850s that the hotel was built around rather than over, and it is now the best pub in St Andrews for a pint of its own Jigger Ale by an open fire after a round in the rain. On a Friday evening in October, half the people in it have just walked off the eighteenth.

"There is no other hotel anywhere that stands inside the geography of the game like this."

“There is no other hotel anywhere that stands inside the geography of the game like this.”

The roof of the spa. The Kohler Waters Spa was the first the company built outside America, in 2006, and after an eight-million-pound rebuild and a further five-month renovation completed in the autumn of 2025 it is the most serious spa on the east coast of Scotland: a twenty-metre pool, a hydrotherapy pool, a thermal suite of steam and sauna and cold plunge, and thirteen treatment rooms. But the thing guests mention six months later is the rooftop garden, where you can lie in hot water in the open air with the North Sea in front of you and the weather doing whatever it likes overhead. In the rain, it is better still.

Who it is for

Golfers, obviously, and especially anyone with a tee time on the Old Course, who will want to walk to the first tee rather than be driven. Couples where one of you plays and the other does not. Multi-generational family trips — the hotel runs kids-stay-free offers outside peak weeks, and the West Sands absorbs children for a whole afternoon. American and Asian visitors doing Scotland properly, for whom this is the one night they do not want to economise on.

It is not for anyone looking for a small, quiet, country-house sort of stay; this is a large, polished, international hotel and does not pretend otherwise. For ten acres of garden and twenty-four bedrooms, look to Rufflets on the edge of town. And be warned about July 2027: the 155th Open will be played across the road, and rooms that week are sold as packages, months in advance, at prices that make the summer rate look kind.

A little history

The trains reached St Andrews in 1852 and the station stood exactly here, beside the Road Hole, with its goods sheds forming the blind corner that golfers have complained about ever since. When the line closed, British Transport Hotels — the state-owned company that ran the great railway hotels — built this on the site and opened it on 25 June 1968; it was the only new hotel the company ever built. The original was a rather severe concrete affair and the town did not love it. Japanese owners softened it in the 1990s, Kohler bought it in 2004 for around £35 million as its first hotel outside the United States, and successive extensions have given it the sandstone, slate and glass it wears today. The Jigger, the stationmaster's cottage, has watched the whole thing happen.

What to do nearby

Walk the Old Course on a Sunday, when it closes to golf and opens to the town — five minutes from the front door. Read: St Andrews Links, more than the home of golf.

The West Sands, two miles of beach starting five minutes' walk north of the hotel; go at low tide, early.

St Andrews Cathedral and St Rule's Tower, fifteen minutes on foot through town; climb the tower for the view back over the Links to the hotel. Read: St Andrews Cathedral, where the story began.

Eden Mill, the town's gin and whisky distillery, ten minutes by taxi at Guardbridge. Read: Inside Eden Mill.

Dinner in town at Forgan's, in an old golf-club factory on Market Street, ten minutes' walk. Read: Forgan's, St Andrews.

The R&A World Golf Museum, opposite the first tee. Read: The R&A World Golf Museum. [when published]

Arriving without a car: Read: The overnight train that takes you from London to St Andrews.

https://www.oldcoursehotel.co.uk/