A seaside villa with Classical Italianate features, Villa Marina was also provided with a cottage (now Villa Marina Cottage) which accommodated the gig driver and his family upstairs, with the horse and gig housed in a stable on the ground floor. Sympathetically restored in recent years, both villa and cottage immediately overlook the shingle beach known as Silver Bay, with breathtaking views across the Firth of Clyde to the Isle of Bute, and the rugged high cuillin of the Isle of Arran. To the west are the Cowal mountains of Argyll, to the east, the Lowland hills up-river to Greenock and beyond.  Villa Marina Cottage, located to the rear of the main house combines privacy and tranquillity in a secluded setting with a magnificent sea view (see photo album).

Villa Marina Cottage, its dormers and gables a foil for the less frivolous main house (pictured left) is quiet and secluded.  It sits in mature gardens, with as a backdrop the ancient sea-cliffs of the last Ice Age – now heavily wooded – where the sea used to break ten thousand years ago. Indeed, the property is built on a ‘raised beach’ – one of the finest in Europe – which rose from the sea when the weight of the glaciers was removed at the end of the Ice Age.

Kilcreggan is literally The First Village in the Highlands, as the Highland Boundary Fault, which separates the Highlands from the Lowlands, runs across the Rosneath Peninsula and into the south end of the village, before continuing under the sea to the distant Isle of Arran. This remarkable geological feature is dramatically apparent as the glen through which the B833 road runs as it approaches Kilcreggan from the east. Here, the characteristic West Highland landscape of sea lochs and high mountains abruptly begins. To the north and west, by road, rail or ferry, Kilcreggan is ideal for touring the rugged west coast of Scotland, and yet so much of Lowland Scotland is within reach too.