Hill House

The publisher Walter Blackie, who had admired Mackintosh's work at the Glasgow School of Art, asked him directly for a family house on a hillside site above the Clyde and largely left him alone to design it. Mackintosh massed the house as an asymmetrical composition of harled walls, tall chimneys and a cylindrical turret rather than as a period pastiche of any single Scottish style, and then, with Margaret Macdonald, carried the same invention indoors: a dark, book-lined hall gives way to a white drawing room and a bedroom stencilled with a rose motif repeated from the furniture to the fabric. Blackie's own choice of cement-based harling for the exterior render proved poorly suited to Scotland's climate, and water penetration around the chimneys and parapets caused decades of damage that resisted repeated repair. In 2019 the National Trust for Scotland, which has owned the house since 1982, enclosed the entire building inside a chainmail-clad steel shelter designed by Carmody Groarke, letting it dry out over a period of years while an elevated walkway lets visitors keep circling it.