The Coftie effect: Comfort, connection and conscious hospitality at The Lovat

Hi, Caroline.

Welcome to Checking In, and thank you so much for joining us.

Lovely to be here.

Thank you.

So I guess to begin with, can you tell us a bit about your career history and how you came to, uh, run The Lovett, uh, with your husband?

Absolutely.

So after finishing university and, uh, doing event management down in London, I was there for about two and a half years, and I wasn't particularly happy.

I felt that I kind of needed to do something else and work for myself.

Wasn't really sure exactly what direction that was gonna go, and at the time my, um, parents had just retired.

Mm.

Um, we've had hotels in our family for over 30 years, well, 40 years now, and my dad was struggling with retirement, so we were in conversation, and we decided, "Um, let's go into business together."

Oh, wow.

And so I entrusted him with finding a location, and he viewed a few different properties and said, "Look, do you wanna coming up- come up and have a look at this property?" Which he'd found on Loch Ness.

So that was kind of the start of it.

I k- I flew up from London, had a look around, and said, "Yep, okay, why not?" So at the time I was 25, and I just thought, "Okay, this is the start of a career, whatever that's gonna be, but I'm not gonna be here for, for that long." And I, I gave them four years.

I said, "Look, you know what? Let's work together for four years and see what happens." And here I am 21 years later.

Incredible.

Um, and I mean, it, it was a massive project.

Um, it was basically a ripping out of the whole building, um, and leaving the four walls and, and doing a massive refurbishment, million-pound, uh, refurbishment project.

And, um, as I say, I was only gonna be here for the four years, but then there was the, the, the kind of economic crash.

And so I was kind of-

Mm

... um, forced into making certain decisions because, you know, we had, uh, requirements, bank loans, and things like that.

Mm-hmm.

And, and so I'd k- kind of fallen in love with what I was doing, and so it made sense to, to stick around a little bit longer.