Reimagining the Home of The Dalmore

With a history spanning almost 190 years, The Dalmore has embarked on a major distillery expansion, creating a newly reimagined home that reflects the complexity of our whisky making while honouring our royal heritage and the enduring legacy left by the Mackenzie family.

To bring the expansion to life, we commissioned Threesixty Architecture to design a new stillhouse and repurpose the existing Victorian buildings to create a state-of-the-art distillery and a world-class guest experience for those who come to discover it.

Founded in 2005, Threesixty Architecture is a Glasgow-based architectural practice known for its thoughtful, future-focused designs. As a B Corp-certified practice, the studio takes a collaborative approach that balances heritage, sustainability and innovation. Its people-centred ethos considers not only how spaces function but the emotional response a building or environment can evoke.

Awarded Scotland’s Architectural Practice of the Year in 2025, the company specialise in projects across the UK that challenge a standard approach. Their work spans distilling projects, retail, and urban design, creating considered spaces that respect a sense of place while confidently shaping what comes next.

The brief presented to Threesixty Architecture concentrated on The Dalmore’s vision of the future: to create an authentic home that spoke to the DNA of our brand. Crucially, the distillery needed to stand the test of time, supporting us into the next century and beyond.

In respect to The Dalmore’s ambition for future growth, it was important to be able to increase production capacity when needed, which meant installing new stills. However, this brought an element of risk, as the remarkable depth of our spirit is entirely shaped by our existing, unbalanced stills, producing two distinct flavour profiles: one with bright citrus notes, the other with a deep malty character.

“Preserving this setup was essential,” says Steven Pearson, Chief Marketing Officer at The Dalmore. “One of the things that we absolutely needed to ensure was that the artistry of our whisky making remained true moving forward.”

With a plan for an expansion came the opportunity to think about the guest experience at the distillery. Our ambition was to welcome guests with an entirely private, immersive experience unlike anything previously seen at a Scotch whisky distillery - using the scale of the architecture and an unfolding sequence of spaces, enhanced through the use of light, composition and texture.

Threesixty Architecture took a deliberately considered approach to the brief. “The Dalmore is a whisky of great legacy and great tradition,” says Stefano Faiella, Architect and Director at Threesixty Architecture. “Yet it has a modern outlook, so we had to figure out how to take the architecture along with it. The home of a masterpiece has to embody all of those qualities.”

Returning with a detailed proposal alongside an architectural model produced by the in-house visualisation team, Threesixty Creative Lab, the practice provided an invaluable design tool. The model revealed the complexities of the site and through its removable elements allowed the team to visually explore the internal layout to better understand how guests would journey through the spaces.

The proposal placed strong emphasis on preserving the heritage of the distillery buildings. “It was important to add value to the collection of existing buildings,” says Stefano. “While also creating a relationship between The Dalmore’s story and the spaces.”

Working with Blyth & Blyth, the consultant engineers who oversaw the project, and Morrisons Construction, the specialist contractor responsible for the build, work began in spring 2023.

The first stage began with the laying of the new stillhouse foundations, followed by the installation of the structural steelwork during the summer. By autumn, the outer cladding was completed with an expanded anodised mesh overlay to protect the external condensers from the corrosive elements of the salty air from the Cromarty Firth.

Next came the new washback bases, followed by the installation of the new mash tuns in January 2024. The new stills arrived in the spring, the tun-room roof was constructed over the spring and summer of that year, and finally, the additional Oregon pine washbacks were put into place during the summer.

Throughout the project, a large team of skilled stonemasons worked almost every day onsite, carefully reclaiming existing stone where possible, particularly in the courtyard and old kiln area of the distillery.

Alongside this, there have been significant improvements to energy efficiency through the upgrade of supporting infrastructure around the distillery, effectively reducing the carbon footprint of every litre of whisky produced.

Forsyths, the world’s leading distilling equipment specialists, were commissioned to make the stills. This third-generation family business based in Rothes shares a long and closely intertwined history with The Dalmore dating back to the late 1940s.

Taking painstaking measures, Forsyths reproduced a new set of copper pot stills to exactly replicate the originals. To discover more about how the stills were meticulously recreated and installed, please see our accompanying article to this series, The Dalmore Distillery Reimagined: A Stillhouse Built with Purpose.

In the completed stillhouse, the new stills with their criss-crossed formation are a breathtaking focal point, yet the accompanying floor-to-ceiling fused-glass window is a sight to behold. Created by artist John Kenneth Clark, it bathes the stillhouse in a warm whisky-palette of colour and creates a visually dramatic and uniquely introverted setting. 

For a deeper dive into the creation of the stillhouse window, please see our accompanying article to this series, The Dalmore Distillery Reimagined: A Window Illuminating the Artistry of The Dalmore.

The Dalmore Experience has been thoughtfully designed to be a journey through a series of uniquely immersive rooms and sensory galleries, each unveiling a chapter in the story of The Dalmore’s whisky-making artistry.

A defining highlight is the stillhouse, with its brand-new symphony of stills, as well as the reimagined old kiln – a breathtaking triple-height space crowned by its original pagoda roof. “The fact that we’re able to welcome guests into these spaces is extraordinary,” says Stefano. “I can't think of another distillery that has the wealth of space at its disposal to create an experience of this magnitude.”