Whitehill Farm house

The shepherd who tended this land lived at Whitehill for forty years. When Cara inherited the house from her father, it took her the best part of a decade to work out what it should become. "It always had lovely bones," she says. The trouble was the rest: ceilings under two metres, a warren of small rooms below. The answer, when it finally came, was drastic. The whole interior was stripped out and the house rebuilt around one big main room, with a new wing behind for the bedrooms. The stone exterior stayed exactly as the shepherd left it.

That main room is where everything happens. Open plan, a large wood burner, a window seat, and glass on every side taking in the Ochil Hills to the south and the Highland foothills to the north. The kitchen is stocked to a level most rentals don't attempt, right down to the martini glasses. Interiors follow Cara's one house rule, a strict no-print policy: solid colour blocks only, and natural materials in a palette lifted from the hills outside. Sounds fussy on paper. In practice the house just feels calm.

Eight guests sleep across three bedrooms. On the ground floor there's a super king with an en-suite bath and a king served by a bathroom with a walk-in shower. Up the stairs, twins and a double bunk for the children. The family still stay here themselves between bookings, so nothing feels like rental kit. Roe deer cross the fields most evenings and a barn owl keeps the barn next door. Red squirrels are less dependable. Cara says one once bounced clean off the glass door.

"The measure of success for us is when whole days pass and nobody has felt the urge to go anywhere," she says. Gleneagles is three miles away for when the urge does come.