pounds 6m facelift for the love nest of Coco Chanel Highland

  He is considered the property-known outside the European continent, with an interior of Coco Chanel, and long thought that the house of the first bidet in Scotland.

Now the 20-room mansion that served as the country's love nest of the French designer and one of his admirers, is richer in line for a £ 6 million facelift as a boutique hotel.

A Scottish architectural firm was commissioned to Rosehall Sutherland House, where Chanel in the 1920s as the mistress of the second Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, then the richest man in Britain, who was known was to restore to friends as Bendor, following the crest of the family that has a bend or, or a band of gold.

Architectural firm of Bell Ingram Design was appointed to lead the project and wants to revive Chanel designs. Although the 20-room mansion has been unoccupied for over 50 years, is still plenty of ideas, provide a model for Chanel.

Chanel beige wallpaper residue remains deep, with its simple wood fireplaces, hand-painted floral wallpaper, French and green color palette wardrobe. She also has a bath, bidet, the first in Scotland to be installed, configured included.

Bell Ingram Director Iain Cram said: "Although it is impossible for all the functions that we have a real opportunity to restore this cultural gem in something like its former glory save Our goal is to work very closely with planners to try. possible to ensure all features remnants of the building to its conservation and preservation of the influence of Chanel, as much as possible. "

The first job, Cram said, would stop the rain in the property who is suffering from "chronic water infiltration" with several leaks. "We must go to save the building, the building mounted, then fit-out," said Cram. "It's a huge amount of work to do."

In 1923, Chanel was the daughter of a laundress, a global fashion icon with her hats, styles and tastes and push a number of enthusiasts have become rich, presented to the Duke of Westminster, in Monte Carlo at the age of 42 years. His large property incomes in agriculture has been said, a Guinea a minute. Their affair lasted until 1930, but the question of why she married him, replied the famous Chanel, "There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel."

The Duke paid his French Riviera villa, where guests of the painters Pablo Picasso and Pierre Bonnard, and who went on the market last year for £ 35m. But the couple - the common violently anti-Semitic - even together in Scotland, Dundee Earl MP Winston Churchill, who stayed there to recover from an illness in 1928, lived among her guests at Rose Hall, 50 miles north of Inverness. Chanel's biographer, Justine Picardie has shown how she spent three summers together on the field on the banks of the River Cassley.

As a fashion icon, Chanel pioneered everything from sun tan pants for women, while her perfume Chanel No. 5 was published in 1921. There are later indications of the influence of Scotland on your creations in fabric from cashmere very soft and tweeds to the Duke two-tone shoes.

It seems she was given a free hand to renovate the house. The painting is in the public spaces in the colors of the parts of his Paris apartment, while the changing rooms on the ground floor has an unusual shade of green with green glass tiles. The French hand-painted floral motifs in the rooms are also thought to be absorbed by time of Chanel, when the bidet is actually a famous model Shanks, made in Glasgow for export.

"There are very few traces of Chanel-style, but there are color and texture," said Cram. "There are a few tracks and probably sufficient to restore it. We know how extensive it was and because she worked with the original building, we do not have much to re-create it.

"It's very muted beige, but also scratch, what would have very radical for its time. The colors that they had set up would not be out of place in a modern boutique hotel."

Time Burkinshaw, head of fashion at Edinburgh College of Art, said of Chanel designer was in the Rue Cambon in Paris, where they learn a store. "She is very stylish and opulent, and nearly an authentic French style rural aristocrat," he said.

The Duke in 1928, Rose Hall, his affair with Chanel cooled gradually sold. She died in 1971 at the age of 87 The Duke ahead of her in 1953 at the age of 73 The buyers were the Graesser family from Wales, who ran as their retirement until the 1960s, when left alone.

Bell Ingram is to submit a planning application for the property to Highland Council. A businessman has been acquired for the development of Salford, which brings a large extent on the attractiveness of the Chanel connection. It has now been replaced by a group of business people who are backing Birmingham to transform the plan, the main house into a hotel and the construction of eight flats catering to a discreet distance.

"Without the connection Chanel, it would be in danger of terminal decline to be," said Cram. "There are many buildings in Scotland who are in a similar condition, which have had no chance of Rose Hall."