Changing rooms through the ages

Jennifer Cunningham unlocks the doors to the hidden treasures of the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement and reveals a wealth of talent.

All over Scotland there are gems of Arts and Crafts houses. Over the years many have been built around so that their quiet graciousness now springs a surprise amid suburban streets in Dundee and Helensburgh, modern mass building in Alloa, the natural grandeur of the Orkney island of Hoy or in the sleepy Perthshire village of Fortingall.

The movement, whose heyday was in the early twentieth century, is best-known for the examples of the decorative arts, particularly furniture, pottery and textiles, which continue to be cherished, but it encompassed the whole of life from the original design of a house to the workings of a window latch.

The houses born of the movement provide a reminder that at its heart was a recipe for life. Many remain lovingly cared for and the recognisable features add to their value, but few display their charms to the curious public. The Hand, Heart and Soul exhibition at the Edinburgh City Art Centre, opens up three contrasting examples to the public gaze, by way of short films.

They are tangible testament that much of the movement's cross- border flow between Scotland and England was among architects, but also that it had a distinctive Scottish dimension. Sir Robert Lorimer, probably the most famous Scottish Arts and Crafts architect, worked throughout Britain on country houses and the restoration of domestic and ecclesiastical buildings. In his later career, he championed Scottish vernacular style, declaring, by the time he was designing Formakin in Renfrewshire in 1908 (a mansion built for Paisley stockbroker John Holms for his collection of oriental rugs, porcelain and English furniture), that he "wanted to make it the purest Scotch I've ever done".

Yet the creative melting pot had a rich mix of borrowings from both traditions. The English architect William Lethaby built Melsetter House on Hoy for the Birmingham businessman, Thomas Middlemore, whose wife, Theodosia, was from Sutherland. Edwin Lutuyens, the supreme English country house designer, built Grey Walls at Gullane (originally called High Walls) with a garden by the quintessentially English designer, Gertrude Jekyll, but Lutyens also extended the former Ferry Inn at Rosneath to create a sailors' home at the behest of Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll. The Arts and Crafts movement's first house in Scotland, Arisaig House, in Inverness-shire, was designed in 1863 by Philip Webb, architect of The Red House for William Morris, cited as "the first true Arts and Crafts home".

Skirling House, near Biggar, was designed by Arts and Crafts architect Ramsay Traquair in 1908 round a seventeenth-century farmhouse at the side of the village green in Skirling to provide a country house for Sir Thomas Gibson Carmichael (later Lord Carmichael). Traquair was the son of Arts and Crafts artist, Phoebe Anna Traquair. Skirling House and the First Church of Christ Scientist in Inverleith Terrace, Edinburgh are his major works in Scotland. He lectured in architecture at Edinbugh College of Art before going to McGill University in Canada.

"There's always something needing to be fixed," says Isobel Hunter in the kitchen at Skirling House. She and husband Bob, whose engineering background is proving useful, run their home as a bed-and-breakfast, but it has been a labour of love since they bought it 14 years ago.

The most celebrated feature of Skirling House - a hand-carved ceiling in which each one of a patchwork of carved, wooden roses is different - is not an example of early twentieth-century craftsmanship, but the work of Florentine carvers in the sixteenth century. It was brought to Scotland by Lord Carmichael, and Traquair designed the drawing room at Skirling round it. Although the decorative ceiling and the glass-fronted cabinet designed and built by the Florentine craftsman, Scarselli, which fills one wall, make it undeniably a grand room, its atmosphere is cosy. Generous but short windows achieve a flood of light without losing the domestic scale.

The craftwork of the house, plus a hint of its quirkiness, is evident as soon as you approach the main door; the latch is a carefully-engineered work of art, while opposite, the door to the bicycle shed warns: "Dinna Meddle" in hand-worked black iron. It's a motto the Hunters have been happy to comply with in bringing 21st-century levels of comfort to Traquair's vision. "The bathrooms were originally all together in a separate corridor, which is the way it was done then, but the planners recognised the need to change that," explains Isobel Hunter.

Local specialists have restored the ironwork which was commissioned by Carmichael from Thomas Hadden, Scotland's best-known worker of wrought iron. He developed a long-term relationship with Robert Lorimer, the architect, in whose office Ramsay Traquair was an assistant. Hadden's commissions from Lorimer included the gates for the Thistle Chapel in St Giles Cathedral and the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle, completed in 1927. Lord Carmichael commissioned Hadden for his house at Skirling, but reputedly designed the door latches himself. They are an intriguing collection of animal shapes, including fish and whales for the bathrooms, with monkeys a favourite elsewhere. It all adds an endearing humour to the village house, which was designed as a home; the family's grander pile at Castle Craig - now a drug and alcohol addiction clinic - had to be sold.

Carmichael's sense of fun is also evident in the carvings - a wooden pelican, with a sharp beak, emerges from the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, while a larger, more benign-looking companion keeps guard outside the front door. A three-sided view of this creature is offered from the deep window at the top of the stairs which turns a corridor into an informal sitting space with a deceptive feel of the simple cottage.

The pursuit of simple forms and the use of traditional materials is the hallmark of the most influential of the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement architects, including Robert Rowand Anderson and Robert Lorimer. At the "cottages" he designed at Colinton on the outskirts of Edinburgh, as Dr Elizabeth Cumming notes in her study of the movement in Scotland, Hand, Heart and Soul, "Lorimer cast the mellow shadow of the Scottish vernacular across the stark, formal clarity of advanced London Arts and Crafts thinking".

There were also genuine cottages, such as those by James MacLaren at Fortingall in Perthshire, but the best-known houses are probably the unique mansions commissioned by wealthy clients, such as the Glasgow businessmen who poured their wealth into their homes around the Clyde estuary in Helensburgh and Kilmacolm, designed by architects such as William Leiper, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the inter-generational firms of the Burnets and the Salmons.

It was, Mackintosh's concept of architecture, furniture and decoration as one harmonious whole, which put Glasgow style on the map. The public embraced it at the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1901, where each room in the Wylie and Lochhead pavilion was furnished by a different designer.

Less well-known than Mackintosh's Hill House, the Hand, Heart and Soul exhibition features another Helensburgh house, The Longcroft, designed by architect Alexander Paterson as his own home.

The third house to feature in a short film in the exhibition is Earlshall Castle at Leuchars in Fife. It was a sixteenth-century tower house, the restoration of which from a near-derelict state was carried out by the young Robert Lorimer. The restoration of the seventeenth-century painted ceiling was one of his finest achievements and he designed his first furniture for the dining room.