Before Mackintosh there was Thomson. Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson (1817–1875) was the most original British architect of his generation — a man who never left Scotland yet reinvented Greek architecture from first principles, composing churches, terraces and warehouses of astonishing invention. Glasgow is his city as much as Mackintosh’s: the St Vincent Street Church, the Egyptian Halls on Union Street, and the great terraces of the West End and south side, including Moray Place, where he lived, are all his.
Holmwood, at Cathcart beside the White Cart, is his domestic masterpiece. Built in 1857–58 for James Couper, who ran the paper mill on the river below, it takes the elements of a Greek temple — colonnade, cupola, honeyed stone — and recomposes them asymmetrically, picturesquely, into a modern villa: the bay window a miniature round temple, the chimneys obelisks, every line governed by an eye of absolute confidence. Architectural historians have long noted how far it looks forward; Frank Lloyd Wright’s admirers find much at Holmwood that Wright would do half a century later.
Thomson designed inward as completely as Mackintosh would: friezes, stencilled walls and painted ceilings in Greek key and anthemion, a parlour ringed by scenes from the Iliad, colour schemes of extraordinary richness. Later use as a convent school overpainted nearly all of it — and, mercifully, thereby preserved it.
By the early 1990s Holmwood stood empty and threatened with development. A vigorous campaign brought it to the National Trust for Scotland in 1994, and since then conservators have been engaged in one of Scotland’s most painstaking restorations, uncovering and returning Thomson’s decorative schemes inch by stencilled inch — work that continues, and which visitors watch in progress.
Thomson’s reputation, overshadowed for a century by the Mackintosh cult, has been climbing steadily back to where his contemporaries placed it. Holmwood is the best single place to see why — and to meet the other half of Glasgow’s claim to be, twice over, a city of architectural genius.