Meet Simon Hunt

We had the good fortune of connecting with Simon Hunt and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Simon, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I met my wife in 2012 when we both lived in Dubai. I’m Australian and she’s English. Our entrapenurial journey started from a casual thought we had while staying in airbnbs ourselves during travel in 2013. Our initial thought was a basic one; “we could start an airbnb stay somewhere interesting ourselves one-day”. Shortly after having a few of these day-dreamy holiday chats over drinks, never with any real plans of where, how or when… we stumbled on a small castle in Scotland. Kilmartin Castle, built in 1550 seemed too good to be true. It was amazing and really cheap! Located in an amazing area called Kilmartin Glen, home to Scotland’s highest concentration of archeological sites, (Glen means valley), our Glen is the birthplace of Scotland where Neolithic life flourished after the last ice age. It’s an incredibly moving wild landscape interspersed with signs of 10,000 years of human activity; Standing stones, hill forts, stone circles and ruined castles dotted throughout this primordial Scottish landscape. When we found the castle, we had a pretty basic thought process and approach of asking ourselves “Whats the worst that can happen?” If it doesn’t work, we’ll just sell it. Keeping your day job and beginning slowly as a side-hustle is a good way to reduce the risk (and stress) of starting your own thing.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
10 years ago we purchased a run-down castle in Scotland and have transformed it into a multi-award winning boutique hotel that the New York Times listed as number 4 in their global 52 best places special in 2023, and the British Times has just named as “Scotlands Coolest Castle” in 2024.

We are so proud of these recent accolades, but it all didn’t start out like that… back in 2014. We worked in stages while keeping our day jobs. The first stage was spending our 3 weeks of annual leave from work frantically giving the castle a rough interior makeover: Critical repairs and 120L of paint was just the beginning to get it onto Airbnb as very basic accommodation.. This way it at least started generating some income to offset the mortgage payments. We managed it remotely from Dubai while we kept working our jobs and saving as much money as we could to do the final renovation one day… we’d spend the next 4 years of our holidays there working on it and fixing things!

Getting married in our very own castle during 2016 was a pretty unreal experience. Even if it was a crumbling wreck! The extra flow from all our wedding guests destroyed our primitive septic tank, the next patch up job on our long list…

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
It was our friends enjoyment and amazement in the area while visiting that led us to dream that this could be more than just an Airbnb. In Summer 2018 we quit our jobs to transform the castle into the 5 room boutique hotel it is today. It took nearly 2 years of hard work and cost the purchase price again to creatively restore the castle.

We’d take friends to Kilmartin Museum to see all the treasures found in Kilmartin Glen on display. Lucy’s for an epic “city good” brunch; a flat white with some-creativity-delicious rendition of homemade sourdough with avocado & poached eggs. A walk through Kilmartin Glen’s sprawling archeological sites then up Dunadd Fort, it’s the first kindgdom of Scotland, they called themselves the Scotti people. There’s a footprint carved into stone where the original clan kings were enorgurated. We all slip a shoe off and slide our foot into the ancient stone footprint appointing ourselves monarch for the day.

Website: https://www.KilmartinCastle.com

Instagram: https://www.Instagram.com/KilmartinCastle