No reservations as hotels chief Peter puts the easy life on hold

DOWNHILL all the way. As you read this, Peter Taylor could well be nursing a gin and tonic, with a to-die-for view of the Eiger a mere fondue's throw away. He is taking a skiing holiday in a Swiss resort and why not? Much as he enjoys chairing his taut Town House Company of Edinburgh hotels, it ain't easy.

Then again, he would never say that it's been an Eiger-ish uphill struggle since he launched the company in 1990 with Channing's in the New Town's Learmonth in 1990.

"Certainly we've not had anything dumped in our laps, so to speak. We've worked damned hard, used our energy and intuition, to get where we are with four boutique hotels in Edinburgh and one on the stocks, if you like, in Glasgow.

"But 'struggle'? Personally, I'm not over-fond of the word. I love my job, I relish the challenge. At 63, for me it's a way of life - I don't dodge the cliché - and it's fun. Round-the-clock fun. And the idea of giving it all up in another couple of years . . . well, that just isn't on."

So says his wife Mhairi, two years his junior. She is the company secretary and a director, as are their two sons. Family controlled, the operation is ever so neat and manageable. Complementing the 42 Channings rooms are the Bonham with 48, the Edinburgh Residence with 29 (both located at the West End) and the Howard with 19 in Great King Street.

All New Town properties and we were coffee-ing in the "discreet" Howard, where the silence can be deafening, and where, in 1990, Labour grandee Barbara Castle vanished from our lunch table for half an hour.

Something I'd said, perhaps, but it turned our Babs had unwittingly locked herself in the ladies room. Lord knows how often I'd dined out on that anecdote.

I suspect Peter had heard it at least once but he just smiled graciously. He smiles a lot and it can't be too much of an effort, one images, to put on a happy face when everything seems to be tickety-boo with the company.

The one giant step was to break out of Edinburgh and venture into Glasgow. An offer exceeding £4.5 million secured the former Royal Scottish Automobile Club headquarters in Blythswood Square. Peter will have it up and running with 88 rooms and five suites in the spring of next year.

Glasgow is by no means foreign territory to him. He opened the Albany Hotel there in 1973 and was general manager for five years.

"The Albany was something else, way ahead of its time, so I'm no stranger to the city. They're great people, the Glaswegians. They call a spade a spade."

Too many hotels in Edinburgh now? He disagrees. Emphatically. "The way things are going, the way the Capital's economy remains buoyant, supply is not exceeding demand. Our guests look for something different from the big chains. We aim to be refreshingly different, warm and never too pompous."

Peter has kept tabs on the city's economy, having recently completed his two-year stint as President of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce.

Portsmouth-born, he met Fifer and bank manager's daughter Mhairi at the Scottish Hotel School, Glasgow. Her family owned the Lundin Links Hotel, Fife. They married there in 1969, in Upper Largo, had their reception in the Crusoe Hotel in Lower Largo and honeymooned in Ibiza ("in San Antonio, long before it became notorious for swingers and binge drinkers").

They were to acquire the medium-sized Lundin Links Hotel on what was to prove their first foot on the ladder of hotel ownership.

A former chairman of the Scottish Tourism Forum and of the British Hospitality Association, he was awarded an OBE for services to tourism in 2004. What is not generally known about the unassuming Peter Taylor - only his collection of Jon Snow-type ties gets in your face - is that his considerable contribution to the hotel industry nearly didn't materialise.

"My father was in the Navy and, inevitably, he was moved around. He happened to be in Portsmouth when I was born.

"When he was posted to Rosyth we came up here and lived in Edinburgh, just a block away from where we created Channings, as it happened.

"I very much wanted to be a sailor like him but my eyesight failed me and I was obliged to choose an alternative career. The way things turned out, I've no regrets whatever, it should go without saying."

Something of a yachtsman, and determined not to disassociate himself with the Navy, he bought a boat three years ago. He and Mhairi moor it near Oban.

Skiing around the Eiger, sailing off the west coast . . . a company chairman and his loyal secretary have to get clean away from it all from time to time.