House for an Art Lover

The House for an Art Lover is the strangest and most romantic of all the works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh — a house he designed in 1901 but never saw built, raised at last in a Glasgow park nearly ninety years later. It began as an entry in a German design competition, existed for most of a century only as a portfolio of exquisite drawings, and was finally constructed, with painstaking fidelity, between 1989 and 1996 in Bellahouston Park. The result is that rarest of things: a genuine Mackintosh building that its creator never knew.

This page tells its story: the competition that inspired it, the design Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald produced, its disqualification, the drawings that spread across Europe, its remarkable realisation, its interiors, and its life today.

A German competition

The house owes its existence to a competition held at the end of 1900 by the German design magazine Zeitschrift für Innendekoration, published by Alexander Koch. Architects and designers across Europe were invited to submit designs for a ‘Haus eines Kunstfreundes’ — a house for an art lover — set in parkland and executed in a thoroughly modern style. Unusually, the rules positively encouraged an architect and a decorative artist to collaborate on a single, unified scheme, and no arrangement could have suited Mackintosh better. In his wife, Margaret Macdonald — a leading artist of the group later known as the Glasgow Girls — he had exactly such a partner, and together they set to work over the winter of 1900 to 1901.

Mackintosh & Macdonald’s design

What the couple produced was one of the boldest domestic designs of its age: a house of clean white walls and long horizontals, austere yet romantic, in which architecture, furniture and decoration were conceived as a single indivisible whole. Mackintosh submitted the scheme under a pseudonym — fittingly, given the motifs that ran through his art, that of a bird — as a portfolio of beautifully rendered plates showing the exterior and the principal rooms. The drawings fused the elegance of Art Nouveau with a stripped, almost modern severity, and displayed the seamless unity of interior and exterior that was the hallmark of Mackintosh’s finest work and of his collaboration with Macdonald.

Disqualified but admired

The design did not win. Mackintosh’s entry was technically disqualified, because some of the interior drawings arrived after the deadline and the portfolio was judged incomplete; and, as it happened, the judges declined to award their first prize to anyone at all. Yet the assessors could not ignore the quality of what he had sent. They singled out his scheme for special praise — for its ‘pronounced personal quality’, its novel and austere forms, and the complete unity of its interior and exterior — and awarded it a special prize. It was a striking verdict: a disqualified entry recognised, even so, as the most original in the field.

The drawings that travelled

Though nothing was built, the design was far from lost. Early in 1902 Koch’s Darmstadt publishing house issued the competition schemes as a portfolio of full-colour lithographs, and through it Mackintosh’s ‘House for an Art Lover’ travelled across the Continent, admired by architects and designers in Germany, Austria and beyond. At a time when Mackintosh was little honoured in his own country, these plates did much to build his towering reputation in Europe, where his influence on the emerging modern movement would be profound. For most of the twentieth century, however, the house remained exactly what it had always been — a masterpiece on paper, one of the great unbuilt designs of modern architecture.

Building the unbuilt

Then, in the late 1980s, came an extraordinary idea: to build the house at last. The moving spirit was Graham Roxburgh, a consulting engineer who had restored the nearby Craigie Hall, which contains original Mackintosh interiors, and who resolved to realise the unbuilt design in Bellahouston Park. It was no simple matter. The 1901 drawings had been made to win a competition, not to build from, and a team of architects, led by Professor Andrew MacMillan of the Glasgow School of Art, together with many artists and craftspeople, had to do years of detective work — turning to the houses Mackintosh and Macdonald had actually completed for clues to how their paper house should be made real. Construction ran from 1989 until the house opened to the public in 1996.

The rooms

The interiors are the heart of the house, and the grandest of them is the Music Room — a soaring, light-filled space of white and silver, with tall windows, stylised roses and shimmering gesso decoration, one of the most beautiful rooms the Mackintoshes ever conceived, even at eighty years’ remove. Around it are ranged the other principal rooms of the design, among them the Oval Room and the Dining Room, each realised from the original plates. Throughout the house, copies of Mackintosh’s competition drawings hang alongside the finished rooms, so that visitors can compare the vision of 1901 with its fulfilment — a building and its own blueprint, side by side.

The house today

Today the House for an Art Lover is an arts and cultural centre, set among the gardens of Bellahouston Park on the south side of the city. It welcomes visitors to its Mackintosh rooms, hosts exhibitions, events and weddings, and has been home to studios of the Glasgow School of Art; it is, in every sense, a living building rather than a museum. There is a gentle paradox at its heart — a twentieth-century construction of a design its creators never built — but few who stand in the Music Room would quarrel with the result. Alongside the surviving masterpieces such as the Willow Tea Rooms, it offers something unique: the chance to walk through a Mackintosh dream that, for almost ninety years, existed only on paper.

The essentials