Glasgow is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and we went to see the Hunterian Gallery’s reconstruction of the house he designed for himself at Southpark Avenue, the exhibition at the Kelvingrove Museum about the Glasgow Style, and The Hill House, his most important domestic project, made for the publisher William Blackie.
All the photos here were taken at Hill House, except the last, taken at Glasgow Art School.
Mackintosh lived at Southpark Avenue in the later years of his partnership with Honeyman and Keppie and just as he began to practice on his own, so the house was his business card. He and his wife remodelled it, added doors and windows and commissioned furniture, fittings and textiles. It was designed to be airy and open, they used pattern sparingly and most of the rooms have white walls. A rare innovation was fitted carpets, made from stitching together narrow-loom runners. The effect is forward-looking and modern and strikingly different from the busy Arts and Crafts style popular in England at the time.
Mackintosh’s inspirations are partly Japanese and partly Celtic but he made something new out of them, designing houses with light, clever management of space and controlled use of colour. (He objected to Mrs Blackie putting yellow flowers in Hill House.)
His buildings are so iconic that it is surprising to find that Mackintosh was not successful in Glagow and was more appreciated in Vienna, where he influenced the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. The Blackie family loved Hill House and lived there until the 1950s.
Mackintosh was meticulous and demanding and the Glasgow Art School was horribly late and over budget.
The Art School is still covered in scaffolding as it undergoes major repairs following the fire.
MARSHALL COLMAN 