Shake off all the props—the props tradition and authority offer you—and go alone—crawl—stumble—stagger—but go alone.
—Charles Rennie Mackintosh, “Seemliness” (lecture), 1902
To stand in a Mackintosh building is to experience a calming, harmonious, and immersive space. Contrasts of light and dark and a spare use of color, in tandem with rhythmic lines of woodwork and applied decoration, produce a tranquil yet invigorating effect on those who stand within them. Every small detail of Mackintosh’s interiors—wall decoration, fittings, furniture, and furnishings—is crucial to the whole. The German language distills this into one word: Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art.
Mackintosh completed his first full domestic commission—the building and interior of Windyhill in Kilmacolm—in 1901, the year he became a full partner at the architectural firm Honeyman & Keppie. Over the next three years he shaped and furnished publisher Walter Blackie’s family home, The Hill House in Helensburgh, which is considered his greatest domestic architectural work.
From 1903 Mackintosh’s interiors began to depart from the principles of the Glasgow Style and show an increasingly imaginative use of the square and its arrangement into grids and cubes. The architect employed the square to underpin his furniture designs, giving prominence to the resulting severe yet sculptural wooden forms through an ebonized or dark stain finish. The furniture acted as a bold sculptural counterpoint to the softer elements within the interior, while simultaneously directing the eye to link its forms with the tiny squares and grids appearing as two-dimensional decoration elsewhere in the room.
Catherine Cranston’s tearooms gave Mackintosh a regular outlet to develop his ideas for furniture design and spatial transformation. Her Willow Tearooms, which opened in October 1903, was his most imaginative suite of dining spaces to that point. She extended her commission to include the luxurious decoration of her marital residence, the eighteenth-century mansion house Hous’hill in Nitshill to the south of Glasgow. Hous’hill does not survive, although many of Mackintosh’s furnishings and designs for it do.
Design for the principal bedroom, The Hill House: west wall elevation, 1903
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Watercolor and gold paint on wove paper
From the collections of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, GLAHA 41116
Design for a bedroom, Dresdner Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst: fireplace wall, 1903
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Pencil and watercolor on paper
From the collections of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, GLAHA 41130
These drawings show two related bedroom interiors Mackintosh designed one after the other in 1903. The design for a bedroom at The Hill House shows a bed and washstand. The walls were decorated with leaded colored glass, embroidery, and a delicate stenciled rose scheme in gray, while textiles to be made by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh would hang above the bed.
The Hill House bed and washstand were the starting point for a starkly designed bedroom that Mackintosh installed that same year at an exhibition in Germany organized by the Dresdner Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst (Dresden Handicrafts Workshops). The square dominated this room’s design, as it was applied as a repeating element to flat surfaces and as part of the construction of two tall chairs that feature a three-by-three grid at the top of their high backs. These chairs would lead Mackintosh to design two equally tall ladderback chairs (so-called because they have horizontal rungs up the back) in 1905 for a bedroom at The Hill House. Here, however, the chairbacks were topped with a five-by-five grid. You can see these in the film in the next gallery.
Chair for the drawing room and music room, Hous’hill, 1904
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Made by Alex Martin
Stained and polished sycamore, enameled glass, and modern upholstery
Glasgow Museums: Bought with grant aid from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, 2002, E.2002.4
This is one of the small chairs Mackintosh created for Hous’hill. It is subtle in design, but complex in construction. The carefully shaped lengths of wood that form the back subtly taper and curve as they progress down from the top back rail, turning into fine-bladed fins toward the floor. Mackintosh set enameled glass ovals into the chair backs and the room’s slatted dividing screen, creating an effect that perhaps suggests musical notes on staves—an appropriate idea for a room designed for a piano.
Card table for the Billiards Room, Hous’hill, 1904
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Made by Francis Smith
Stained oak and brass
Glasgow Museums: Bought with grant aid from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, 2002, E.2002.5
Mackintosh visually lightened this square card table by replacing the typical bulk of standard table legs with two thin columns angled at forty-five degrees to the tabletop. In a further unusual twist, he punctured the cross-stretchers under the table with squares to draw the viewer’s gaze to the floor. This table was to sit within the deep recess created by a bay window, and Mackintosh’s radically open framework allowed daylight to pass through and cast shadows of the raised stretchers onto the ground.
Stool for a dressing table for the Blue Bedroom, Hous’hill, 1904
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Made by Francis Smith
Oak with modern upholstery
Glasgow Museums: Bought with grant aid from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, 2002, E.2002.6.a
The square underpins the design of the decoration, furniture, and fittings for the Blue Bedroom at Hous’hill. This small stool shows the subtlety with which Mackintosh employs the square to construct his furniture designs. The lower frame contains a perfect square, drawn by the rails, stretchers, and legs. A row of smaller squares forms its back.
Stencil card for the decoration of the hall, The Hill House, 1904
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Made by J. & W. Guthrie and Andrew Wells Ltd., Glasgow, 1904
Card with water-based paint
Glasgow Museums: Bought 1984, E.1984.32.1
This card is for a stencil that Mackintosh devised for the main hall at The Hill House. The house decorators Guthrie & Wells probably cut this card for test purposes, as the traces of colored paint do not match those used in the finished scheme of the hall. The black areas on the card show the body of the design that was ultimately executed in blue. For the final multi-stencil execution of this design, Mackintosh chose a rose pink and dark brown for the checkered areas, and a bright green for the ellipse and drops. A third stencil would have been cut to apply alternating squares in silvery pink.
Chair, first designed for the writing desk for The Hill House, 1904–5
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), 1904
Made by Alex Martin, 1905
Ebonized wood with modern upholstery
Glasgow Museums: Given by Mr. W. Sommerville Shanks, RSA, 1940, E.1940.16.a
This chair, which Mackintosh designed for his own home, is a slightly taller version of one he first created to accompany the ebonized mahogany writing desk for The Hill House. At first glance, the chair design seems rigidly angular, especially with its strong vertical lines and two central columns of squares. Yet Mackintosh always offset such severe geometries with a subtle softer line, here present through the tall, gently concave back that curves away from the rear of the seat.
Stool for Miss Cranston’s Willow Tearooms, 1903
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Probably made by Alex Martin
Ebonized oak with modern horsehair upholstery
From the collections of The Glasgow School of Art, MC/F/44A
This sturdy cuboid stool shows Mackintosh taking the use of squares to its most logical design extreme in a single piece of furniture. Its overall form is made entirely from squares, grids, and cubes. The lowest stretchers are raised just above the floor, creating rectangular openings around the base that balance the design. This stool was probably used by the tearooms’ all-female waitstaff at serving stations positioned throughout the building.
Design for a decorative relief plaster frieze, Miss Cranston’s Willow Tearooms, 1903
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Pencil and watercolor on wove paper
From the collections of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, GLAHA 41079
This drawing for two panels of a repeating cast-plaster frieze sees Mackintosh experimenting with surface pattern and color for Catherine Cranston’s new tearoom enterprise of 1903, the Willow Tearooms. This, Mackintosh’s most luxurious suite of dining interiors, was designed as a unified, total work of art. Inspired by the tearooms’ location on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street—which means “alley of willows” in Gaelic—Mackintosh references the forms of willow trees throughout the building. The cast-plaster relief panels installed onto the walls of the ground-floor luncheon room were plainer than these designs. There they were painted in lead white with bright green paint applied to some of the raised lines to suggest tree forms.
Design for a table and chair for the Room de Luxe, Miss Cranston’s Willow Tearooms, 1903
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Pencil, watercolor, and gold paint on wove paper
From the collections of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, GLAHA 41072
The Willow Tearoom’s most sumptuous and intimate interior was the Room de Luxe on the second floor. This drawing shows the square-topped tables and high-backed chairs that Mackintosh designed for this room. The chairs would have had great impact, as they combined rich purple velvet upholstery, wood painted with an aluminum pigment, and purple glass set into the square cutouts at the top of the chair backs. The drawing also shows how Mackintosh designed a custom carpet woven with dotted squares and rectangles to frame the positions of the furniture at floor level.
Design for furniture for the Blue Bedroom: north and south wall elevations, Hous’hill, 1904
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Pencil and watercolor on wove paper
From the collections of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, GLAHA 41115
This drawing records ideas for two opposing walls in the Blue Bedroom at Hous’hill. The left half is a view toward the double bed, with tall alcove bedside cabinets and a sofa at the foot of the bed. The right half shows the fireplace design with built-in seats creating a space known as an inglenook. The stenciled decoration and mounted light fittings on the walls rhythmically link the design features within the room. The bedroom chairs depicted in this drawing are a taller version of the bedroom stool seen nearby.
Design for furniture and screen for the drawing room and music room, Hous’hill, 1904
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Pencil and watercolor on paper
From the collections of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, GLAHA 41152
In his design for the drawing room decoration at Hous’hill, Mackintosh employed a curved, white-painted, vertically slatted screen to create a music room by subdividing the interior. A high-backed bench, shaped like a perching peacock with a long folded tail, was also part of Mackintosh’s early proposal, but this imaginative avian component was never made.
Lampshade design for the standard lamp, The Hill House, 1905
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Pencil and watercolor on paper, with sample of woven textiles
From the collections of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, GLAHA 41769
Embroidered panel from the standard lampshade, The Hill House, 1905
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Silk and glass beads
Glasgow Museums: Given by Mary Newbery Sturrock, 1953, E.1953.94
This silk panel is a surviving fragment of the original lampshade Mackintosh designed for the drawing room at The Hill House. The bold lines drawn by the black ribbon depict stylized leaves, stems, and veining. Nestled within this framework are two roses, each flower drawn with a single spiraling line of braid. Beads to add color would have hung at the bottom of the shade from graded lengths of black ribbon, while the small glass beads sewn to the black, ribboned gridwork add texture and luminosity at the top. Though exposure to light has faded the shade’s color over time, traces of the pink silk of the flowers under the lime-green braid are just visible. Swatches of the original pink and green silks attached to the design drawing hanging above allow us to appreciate the lampshade’s original vibrant color scheme.
Two panels for the Rose Boudoir, 1902
Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Leaded glass and metal
From the collections of The Glasgow School of Art, MC/F/101C & 101A
Mackintosh’s close study of flowers and plants enabled him to distill their essential forms and structural components. This process greatly informed his work. In these small leaded glass panels, Mackintosh rejected a naturalistic representation of roses in favor of an energetic tangle of lines that communicate an abstract life force. These panels were made for the Rose Boudoir, a room he and Margaret designed for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts in Turin, Italy, held between May and November 1902.
Cuckoo Flower, Chiddingstone, 1910
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Pencil and watercolor on paper
From the collections of The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, GLAHA 41028
Throughout his life Mackintosh regularly sketched and drew flowers, as an essential part of his creative practice. In the early 1900s he devised this distinctive style for his botanical studies using pencil and watercolor. He outlines in detail the cuckoo flower’s forms, superimposing its flowers, buds, leaves, and stems over one another as if all elements are transparent. A view of the same plant from above, and studies of a different small blue flower, can be seen to the right.
Each flower drawing has a box to identify, locate, and date it. The initials record who was present with Mackintosh at the time; beside his own initials, he places those of his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh.
Faded Roses, 1905
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)
Watercolor and pencil on paper
Glasgow Museums: Given by the late George Sheringham and his wife Sybil Sheringham, 1938, 2088
This flower composition differs from Mackintosh’s usual delicate stylized botanical studies, exemplified by Cuckoo Flower (displayed nearby). In this painting he uses watercolor to convey the papery quality of the dried-out petals and leaves. The downward motion of the drooping flower heads and dark, vertically streaked background emotively convey the work’s melancholy feel.
