The Mackintosh House

Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald designed some of the most celebrated interiors of their age for other people. The Mackintosh House shows the rooms they made for themselves. Their terraced house in Hillhead was demolished in 1963, but its fittings were saved, and the principal rooms were reassembled inside the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery, a short walk from where the house once stood. Furnished with the couple’s own furniture, it is the nearest anyone can now come to stepping inside the Mackintoshes’ home.

From Mains Street to Hillhead

After their marriage in 1900, Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald rented a flat at 120 Mains Street in the city centre and remodelled its interiors. Photographs of those rooms were published in the magazine The Studio in 1901. In 1906 they moved west to 6 Florentine Terrace, a mid-Victorian terraced house on Hillhead, close to the University of Glasgow. The house was later renumbered as 78 Southpark Avenue.

Mackintosh made major structural changes. He gave the hall a new front door, a south-facing window and panelling. In the dining room he added a new fireplace. On the first floor he knocked two rooms together to form an L-shaped studio-drawing room, stripping out the Victorian detail, and on the floor above he did the same to make an L-shaped bedroom. Into these rooms the couple moved the principal fittings and most of the furniture from Mains Street.

The rooms

The contrast between the rooms is striking. The dining room is dark and sombre, with a white ceiling and frieze above stencilled walls and the high-backed chairs that grew from a design of 1898 for Kate Cranston's tea rooms. Upstairs, the studio-drawing room is white throughout, filled with light from a long south-facing window. Some of its stencilled chairs and its oval table were shown in the Rose Boudoir at the Turin exhibition of 1902. The bedroom above is white too, with furniture of 1900 carved with plant and bird forms.

Among the treasures is Mackintosh’s mahogany writing cabinet, which set a world auction record for twentieth-century furniture when it was bought in 1979, a moment described on our Mackintosh legacy page. His white desk includes silvered metal panels by Margaret, and in the hall hangs a beaten lead mirror of 1896, Vanity, made by the Macdonald sisters and Herbert MacNair.

Davidson and the University

The Mackintoshes left Glasgow in 1914, and in 1920 they sold the house, with its Mackintosh furniture and fittings, to William Davidson, a Glasgow collector who, with his wife Jean, built up a fine collection of the couple’s work. Davidson lived there until his death in 1945, and after Mackintosh died it was Davidson who organised the commemorative exhibition of 1933; the following year he gave twelve of Mackintosh’s flower watercolours to the University’s Hunterian collection. His sons, Hamish and Cameron, then gave the Mackintosh contents to the University, which bought the house itself in 1946 as lodgings for professors.

The house did not survive the expansion of the Gilmorehill campus. In 1963 the University demolished the terrace, but before it did so Professor Andrew McLaren Young arranged for the interiors to be photographed and measured, and for the fireplaces, doors, skirtings and other fittings to be removed and stored.

Rebuilding the house

The reconstruction was designed by the architects Whitfield Partners as part of the new Hunterian Art Gallery, built between 1973 and 1981. The aim was for the rooms to match the originals exactly. They were rebuilt in the same sequence over three floors, with the same orientation, about 100 metres from the site of Florentine Terrace, so that the views and the fall of daylight are almost the same as the Mackintoshes knew. Outside, the house is represented by a modified replica of its front, built in concrete rather than the original sandstone.

Recreating the decoration took detective work. In 1979 the curator Pamela Robertson sent line drawings of the rooms to people who had known the house, asking them to recall its colours and fabrics, and the interiors were completed in 1981, decorated as closely as possible to the originals using descriptions and period photographs.

Visiting

The Mackintosh House is entered through the Hunterian Art Gallery on Hillhead Street, beside the University Library. An introductory gallery tells the story of the artists, the house and the collection, and the visit then climbs through the reconstructed hall, dining room, studio-drawing room and bedroom. In 2026 it opens from Tuesday to Sunday, with an admission charge, and guided tours on Friday and Saturday mornings. There are four levels and 62 steps, reached only by stairs.

Together with Queen’s Cross Church, the Willow Tea Rooms and the House for an Art Lover, it is one of the best places to understand the complete interiors that made Mackintosh famous.

Timeline