House for an Art Lover

In 1901, in Glasgow, Scotland, the well-known architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh entered a competition to design House for an Art Lover, arranged by the German design magazine Zeitschrift Für Innendekoration.

At the time, Mackintosh was 33 years old, and had been married for a year to the artist and designer Margaret Macdonald, 38. They took on the competition together, just as they would with many new projects.

Catherine Cranston's tea room, in the centre of Glasgow, which they designed and furnished together, is a good example of Margaret and Charles' cooperation.

Miss Cranston gave them freedom to create a unique avant-garde interior design for The Willow Tea Rooms, including furniture (the highback chair - one of Mackintosh's signatures - is to be found here), light fittings, wall decorations and even the cutlery and the menu card, with text beautifully designed by Margaret. Work like this is called 'total design' and made Miss Cranston's tea room famous all over the world.

There were 36 entries in the open competition. The architects were given 25 days to design a distinctly modern house, where art should be part of the house itself, instead of in a separate art gallery attached to the building.

When we think of their 'total design' of Miss Cranston's tea room, this must have been a perfect starting point for Mackintosh and Macdonald. There was also another unusual clause in the rules, which also would have suited them perfectly well: 'It is permissible and even desirable that an architect and a decorative artist of modern tastes develop and submit the design jointly'. Check!

Within some practical constraints like room sizes and a maximum cost, Charles and Margaret were free to use their skills, inventiveness and fantasy to design the house. Not an ordinary house, but a House for an Art Lover.

25 days later Charles and Margaret submitted their entry, calling it 'the Bird' Why? Either for a special (to me unknown) reason, or just because the entries had to have a title. Unfortunately, they failed to send three perspectives of the interior, and thus were disqualified.

The judges were disappointed in the remaining entries, and the first prize was not won. The English architect M. H. Baillie Scott was awarded second prize. However, Mackintosh and Macdonald completed their entry, which impressed the judges. Thus, their drawings were later published as a set of 14 lithographed plates. But the actual construction of House for an Art Lover was not on the horizon.

From the outside, the house is - overwhelming in size and construction (at least to me). Charles and Margaret concentrated on the interior. Juxtapositions are found all over the house, like light and dark, natural and abstract, feminine and masculine, simplicity and complexity and so on. House for an Art Lover was designed to be seen and experienced as a whole, and is an outstanding example of the Modern Style, British Art Nouveau.

So, did House for an Art Lover only exist on paper? Mackintosh and Macdonald had other things to do. They continued to live and work together, as well as working on projects separately, for the rest of their lives. Charles Mackintosh died of cancer in 1928, Margaret passed away five years later in 1933.

But that's not the end of House for an Art Lover's story which continued until 1989, more than 80 years later! Then Graham Roxburgh, an engineer in charge of restoring another Mackintosh design, has the idea to actually build House for an Art Lover.

Roxburgh and a team of architects, led by Professor Andy MacMillan, had to do a lot of detective work before the building could start. The team found, for instance, that the original drawings were very detailed as a competition entry, but were still not intended to be technical instructions from which a house could be built.

Residential homes completed by Mackintosh and Macdonald over the years became important in providing clues to the building process.

In 1996, House for an Art Lover opened to the public, situated in Bellahouston Park in central Glasgow. The House invites visitors to see rooms furnished and decorated from the original drawings, realised by contemporary artists and craftspeople alongside changing art exhibitions. Charles and Margaret never saw their designs realised, but I really wish that they had!

Bibliography

• Jude Burkhauser (ed.), 1990, Glasgow Girls. Women in art and design 1880-1920, Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing Limited
• Alan Crawford, 1995, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, London: Thames & Hudson Ltd
• Jackie Cooper (ed.), 1984, Mackintosh Architecture. The Complete Buildings and Selected Projects, London: Academy Editions
• Gordon Kerr, 2014, Charles Rennie Mackintosh Masterpieces of art, London: Flame Tree Publishing
• House for an Art Lover wikipedia
• House for an Art Lover website
• Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society website, House for an art lover