Stornoway's new art gallery opened on September 30th 2005 with a seminal exhibition inspired by the sail loft project. The opening night attracted more than 2000 visitors and firmly established An Lanntair back in Scotland's cultural scene. Writing in the brochure prepared for the exhibition, An Lanntair's director Roddy Murray summed it up

"There were good reasons why we chose the Sail Loft project as our inaugural exhibition. It had to be a new and contemporary body of work, be of the Gaidhealtachd and it had to test the new space. A show we could not otherwise have had * But of course it is more than that. The contrasting aspects of this iconic building have a tautness that rings and resonates. It is about past and present, tradition and progression, interior and exterior. It is about the domestic life of a building and about the teeming industry that surrounds it. About the lives of men and women and the roles they had within its ambit. A world of canvas and nets, of tar and salt, barrels and creels, but also of floral wallpaper, knitting and needlework, and porcelain souvenirs brought home from Yarmouth and Lowestoft * It is a homage too to the heyday of the herring, the silver currency that financed the marine highway from the Minch to the Baltic Sea. And the artists represent this international dimension. Ian Stephen from Lewis selected Carina Fihn from Sweden, Mikko Paakola from Finland and Moira Maclean, also from Lewis, to join him. Individually and together they have recast and composed an eloquent vision from the rescued fragments of wallpaper, the bolts of sail canvas, the words, the stories and the testimonies * It seems to me that these two buildings now bookend the town as a symbol of regeneration. An Lanntair is on the site of the old Imperial Hotel while the Sail Loft is adjacent to the Commercial Hotel. There is something wholly satisfying about the symmetry of it all"