In 1901, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, along with his wife Margaret McDonald Mackintosh entered a competition to design a Haus eines Kunstfreundes (House for an Art Lover) run by German magazine Zeitschrift für Innendekoration. His entry, while impressing the judges and public alike, was disqualified on a technicality, (although it was awarded a special prize for its ‘pronounced personal quality, novel and austere form and the uniform configuration of interior and exterior’) and he never saw the house realised in his lifetime.
However, in 1989 an ambitious project began to take his non-technical drawings of both the exterior and interior of the house and turn them into reality, and despite a halt in construction due to the 1990 recession, the finished house was opened to the public in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park in 1996.
I visited Glasgow this week just gone, and took the time to visit the house. Having visited the Hill House in Helensburgh nearly 20 years ago, I had forgotten what it was like to walk into one of Mackintosh’s designs, so it was as much of a thrill for me to see the House for an Art Lover in the flesh as it had been in that seaside town north of Glasgow all that time ago.
Here is a small gallery of images from my visit.
