What began as the small Monachyle Mhor farmhouse hotel has mushroomed into the Mhor Collection, an array of hospitality and food offerings in Perthshire – but all bearing the same traits of distinctiveness and excellence
In the hotel business your reputation is one of your most valuable assets. And in these days of instant online reviews and social media, the personal recommendation of friends and people we actually know becomes even more valuable.
Tom Lewis estimates that 60 per cent of his business comes from word-of-mouth recommendations and repeat business.
Over the past 20-plus years, he has built the reputation of Monachyle Mhor, the boutique hotel and award-winning restaurant at the head of Loch Voil in Perthshire, with hard graft.
The chef hotelier and his wife Lisa May have created a distinctive style – and terrific food – at the 17-room hotel near Balquhidder, while adding other businesses to their portfolio.
There is Mhor84, a motel with Mhor in Store next door, located on the Old Military Road beside the A84 – one of the main routes to the Highlands – self-catering accommodation and Mhor Bread, an artisan bakery in Callander.
Lewis has had to be flexible as he has grown the business. “It’s a limited market. Scotland only has 5.5 million people to make a living from. You have to keep evolving where you can.
“Most of our customers are repeats or word-of-mouth,” Lewis says, adding that to promote the hotel they were attending international travel events themselves. “Now we just don’t have the time. And social media is turning into a dark art.”
To counter that, Monachyle Mhor is now a member of Luxury Scotland, the directory of the country’s top-end accommodation. “Being part of Luxury Scotland gives us a wider reach. People coming on holiday to Scotland come and stay at two or three hotels, so hopefully they will come to us.”
Lewis has experienced ups and downs in the two decades he has been running Monachyle Mhor.
His parents had moved from Wales to the farm in 1983 when Tom was a teenager. They started taking guests and their “farmhouse hotel” developed.
It was the devastating impact of the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease that prompted Lewis, who was by then at the helm, to drop the farmhouse tag.
“That was the turning point. I decided to drop the word ‘farmhouse’ and become a hotel. A farmhouse was worth £10 a night but hotels were worth £20,” he quips.
There were about six staff back then; now, with the expanded Mhor portfolio, there are more than 90 employees.
Like many in the hospitality sector, Lewis is finding it difficult to recruit staff. “I’m not quite sure what happened. All the transient people, like students who came to the UK to learn English, all stopped. You always have your core team, but you need ‘fillers’ at certain times of the year. We can have to find accommodation for over 50 people at one time.”
Monachyle Mhor and Mhor84 are quite different guest propositions, but Lewis believes that they cross over “nicely”.
“We call Mhor84 a motel, so the room is a set price, and then you pay for everything else. Coming to the main hotel you get breakfast, it’s a bit more leisurely, there’s a bit more space, but they are both service orientated, just Monachyle is a bit more so. However, you can put your shoes on the furniture: we’re not precious.”
To underline this approach, Lewis adds: “The rule for both hotels is that we don’t have a table you can’t dance on. If customers are dancing on the table they are having a good night.”
One area that Lewis, a self-taught chef, does take seriously is what he puts on the table. After all, the farm was the heart of the business that his parents bought and where he grew up. His brother Dick now runs it.
For the restaurant, Lewis sources ingredients both seasonally and locally. From the farm come lamb, beef, pork, chicken, eggs, organic vegetables and herbs. There is venison from neighbouring stalkers, as well as wild foraged treats such as wood sorrel and chanterelles. Fish comes from sustainable Scottish sources.
“If we don’t look after the planet, it won’t look after us,” says Lewis. “In the hotel gardens we try to look after nature’s depopulation. We keep bees; we don’t use any pesticides or anything else.”
Recycling is also important. “We try and break our rubbish down as much as we can – we take a little bit of time and separate it rather than just putting a bag out.”
If all this sounds straightforward for Lewis, when you dig deeper about his approach to business, you sense the knock-backs have hurt.
He says last year’s budget cost the business £300,000. “It’s taking away our reinvestment for next year.”
He adds: “The government needs to make money, no-one denies that. We all need to pay tax, everyone’s happy with that. But I just think that one was a big one: it’s taken away the annual investment that we all put back into our business.
“It’s not making money to go away on a Caribbean holiday, it’s making money to reinvest every year into your business. And it’s a very important part of that whole process.”
Asked about changes over the years in the Mhor portfolio, Lewis is blunt: “We had to sell Mhor Fish to pay for our Covid bill.”
And at Mhor Bread, the bakery in Callander which they bought in 2007, they have adapted to the times.
“We rolled it back to take it forward. We stopped supplying wholesale bread on a daily basis. We just concentrated on the product. We’ve got a great team down there.”
And what they make is traditional handmade bread using only Scottish-milled flour, water, and salt. There’s a slow-fermentation process for sourdough, and yeast is only added to some of the breads.
Lewis is philosophical: “I wanted to make chocolate tarts and macaroons. I now sell bread, pies and sandwiches. What you want to do is quite different from what you end up doing.”
However, when asked to look back at the past 20 years, there is a sense of pride: “The fact is that now someone else could buy the business and make a living.”
Not that it looks like Lewis is going anywhere, as the family is busy making plans for the spring.
The 2,000-acre estate, which sits between lochs Voil and Doine at the end of a single-track road and has five Munros on its doorstep, is an attraction in its own right. However, Lewis has already added activities that appeal to guests who are seeking unique experiences to add to their escape to rural Perthshire.
There are farm tours, drinks safaris, foraging expeditions, a loch-side sauna and apitherapy, a sustainable bee-based therapy.
Mhor84, which was added to the Mhor Collection in 2013, has live music weekly and they might run a music event. “A two- or three-day thing, low impact, but excellent quality,” says Lewis.
On the drawing board is an art fair. “It may be the third week of March. We’ll work with other galleries and artists to make something beautiful and accessible … and give people a reason to come back here.”
