Highland Park House to star in channel 5 programme

The story behind the conversion of a Victorian mansion, in Kirkwall, will be the focus of a Channel 5 programme to be shown tomorrow night.

Highland Park House, which was formerly a care home, will feature as part of the series Our Dream Hotel after being filmed last year.

The owners are former teachers Anthony Hodgson and Aine King, who moved to Orkney four years ago from the Brighton area and undertook the challenge of converting the building.

Our Dream Hotel follows first time hoteliers in the UK and abroad as they set up their first business.

Mr Hodgson said: “Highland Park House had been formerly been a care home but it had also been empty for quite a while and was in a fairly poor state of repair. What you see in the programme focuses on one room and the central stair case where the aim has been to stop it looking so institutional, by restoring the original Victorian banisters and taking out the partitions and opening up the rooms again.

“We’ve done a lot of the work ourselves but quite a number of local tradesman have helped out and quite a few of them are interviewed in the programme. They also filmed quite a few locations around Orkney.”

The programme is scheduled to air at 9pm tomorrow night, Tuesday.