House For An Art Lover

It took a team of hand-picked architects, builders and craftsmen 10 years to realise Mackintosh’s dream, assessing just 14 initial drawings before transforming these into an architect’s workable portfolio of almost 400 detailed plans. First imagined and created only as simple pencil drawings by Charles and Margaret, the interpretation, including an element of guesswork, continued throughout the building’s creation as highly skilled artisans experimented with raw materials and colours to recreate stencilled panels, metalwork, glass, stone and wood details that would appear throughout.

Although he would not live to see the House built, it seems rather curious that Mackintosh would possibly have walked through Bellahouston Park and past Ibrox House, the building predating House for an Art Lover, on his way to work at the nearby Craigie Hall.

When answering the competition brief to ‘design a house in a parkland setting’, Mackintosh featured a stone sundial, just like the one that stood outside Ibrox House. The stone sundial still stands alongside the House today. Could his intentions and ours really be one and the same?

Whether through sheer determination or destiny, and in defiance of adversity, House for an Art Lover, as it would affectionately become known, was finally completed in 1999, remaining faithful to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s original 1901 designs.