Unique Cottages Brand Guidelines: A Scottish Borders Agency Letting Only in Scotland

A Borders letting business with a long prehistory.

Unique Cottages is an independent holiday-cottage agency in the Scottish Borders that lets self-catering properties only in Scotland. The register at Companies House shows the business behind it, Ecosse Unique Limited, was incorporated on 10 May 1994; it was registered for its first seven weeks under an off-the-shelf name, Bronzecrag Limited, before taking the Ecosse Unique name at the end of June 1994. A second company, Unique Cottages Limited, was incorporated in June 2002. Both are listed as active and classed under reservation services.

The company tells its founding story through Jill Bristow. In an owner newsletter article of February 2026 it says she grew up in Sussex, spent sixteen years as a guide for a Glasgow-based coach-tour company, and settled in the Borders in the 1960s. There, it says, she began by renovating a disused stone cottage on a farm in the Cheviot Hills, then took on others, among them Dinley Riverside Cottage near Hermitage Castle on the Buccleuch Estate. The company describes a fifteen-year partnership with that estate and says her first business grew to 49 properties.

By the company’s account, she sold that first business to United Auctions of Perth in 1985, later left it, and in 1994, with help from friends, set up Ecosse Unique, “now known as Unique Cottages.” The register’s 1994 incorporation date matches that account. The company also says she helped found the Association of Scotland’s Self-Caterers, the trade body for the sector, in 1978.

From a paper brochure to a booking website.

The business began in a house at Lilliesleaf, a Borders village, where the company says its founder kept an office for four on the ground floor. In 2008, it says, it moved to a cottage on the edge of Newtown St Boswells, with the Eildon Hills behind it, for more space and a faster internet connection. Its registered office is still there, in the middle of the Borders and close to the A68, which the company says makes it easy for owners and guests to call in.

The company’s second figure is Mark Breed, who it names as owner and managing director. It says he joined at eighteen in a temporary summer job, when the booking team matched callers to cottages by flipping through a paper brochure, and that he launched the company’s website in 2002. He became managing director that year, taking over from Jill Bristow, and sole owner in 2016, the company says. The Companies House register agrees on control: it lists him as the one person with significant control of Ecosse Unique, holding 75 per cent or more of the shares, notified in April 2016.

He also photographed the portfolio himself, the company says, travelling from Stranraer to Dunnet Head. Today it says 84 per cent of bookings are made online, with each one checked by a member of the booking team. It describes itself as Scottish-owned, says every property on its books is handpicked and visited, and says some owners have been with it since the beginning.

Its website is built around geography. A search panel lets guests pick a region, and the destinations menu groups Scotland into four broad areas — South of Scotland, Central Scotland, Highland Scotland and West Coast & the Isles — each split into smaller districts such as the Scottish Borders, Perthshire, Orkney or the Isle of Skye & Raasay. A separate map search sits alongside. Holiday ideas are grouped by cottage type, party type, activity and setting, with collections that include estate cottages, log cabins, lochside cottages and “one of a kind” properties.

Design and documentation.

Holiday cottage agencies sell places rather than products, and their pages are built around the property photograph. A typical listing opens on an exterior shot of a cottage, a cabin or a tent in its landscape, followed by interiors, the view from the door and, increasingly, the hot tub or the log burner. The companies publish these images themselves, usually taken for the agency or supplied by the owner, and the look of a brand is set as much by that photography as by any logo.

Naming follows the way people plan a break. Agency menus are organised by region (the Lake District, Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands, North Wales) and by collection: dog-friendly cottages, cottages with a hot tub, coastal cottages, large houses for groups, last-minute breaks. Sykes Holiday Cottages, for example, lists collections of this kind alongside its region pages, and glamping and campsite platforms apply the same logic to shepherd’s huts, yurts, treehouses and pitches.

Search is the core interface. Guests enter a place, dates and party size, then filter by features and browse results as a list or on a map. Some groups now add conversational search: in February 2026 Awaze said it had launched an app within ChatGPT that starts with Cottages.com and returns live availability from a plain-language request.

Behind the consumer brands sits a second audience: property owners. Most agencies run separate pages that invite owners to let their home through them, and corporate sites describe group structures. Several of the names in this guide belong to larger groups: Cottages.com to Awaze, and Sykes Holiday Cottages to Forge Holiday Group, the parent brand Sykes launched in 2023. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it, and what it publishes, and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

Scotland only, by design.

The brand’s central promise is focus. The company says it has “chosen to specialise solely in Scottish holiday cottages,” and its range runs, in its own words, from off-grid bothies to lochside retreats. Its copy for owners leans on long service — “over 30 years of experience in holiday letting,” counted from 1994 — and on a commission-only approach, which it describes as being paid by results.

Service is the other thread. The company says it received the Feefo Platinum Trusted Service Award for 2025 from its independent review provider, and that its rating rests on nearly 30,000 customer reviews. Its owner pages are written in a friendly, direct voice, and its newsletter for owners covers marketing, presentation and website changes. The company’s copy for guests stresses that guests return to the same cottages year after year, and its owner pages say properties are spread across the country rather than gathered in a few places.

What the company tells about itself is mostly its own account: the founder’s years with the Buccleuch Estate, the 1985 sale and the move from Lilliesleaf are given here as the company states them. The dated public record — the 1994 incorporation, the 2002 company and the 2016 notice of control — comes from the register and fits that account. The company does not publish brand guidelines, and the colours used here are our own.

For a design guide, Unique Cottages shows how a small regional agency can build a brand from one country, one office and a founder’s story told plainly. Compare Classic Cottages, another independent agency with a single regional focus, and Sykes Holiday Cottages, a UK-wide agency. For this guide we use an Eildon green, a heather purple and a pale whinstone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Unique Cottages’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.