1892–93: Working for the architectural firm of Honeyman & Keppie, Mackintosh’s projects include designs for a library at Craigie Hall and a new extension for the Glasgow Art Club.
1892: At the age of forty-three, Catherine Cranston marries engineer John Cochrane (eight years her junior). Instead of following the general social convention for women—to give up work after marriage to focus on home and family—she continues her Glasgow tearoom enterprise under her maiden name, an established business brand since 1888: Miss Cranston’s.
1893: Mackintosh and McNair meet fellow students Margaret and Frances Macdonald. The sisters are attending day classes at The Glasgow School of Art.
1893: Mackintosh asserts a new professional identity: he changes the spelling of his surname, is photographed in artistic attire, and aligns himself with progressive contemporary architectural practice.
1893: Mackintosh designs the Glasgow Herald newspaper building. Construction is completed in 1895.
1893, April: The Studio, an illustrated arts magazine that was significant to Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement, is launched in London.
1893: Talwin Morris moves from London to Glasgow to take up the position of art director for publisher Blackie & Son. He and his wife, Alice, quickly become good friends of The Four.
1894: The artist Aubrey Beardsley co-founds the magazine The Yellow Book with the American writer Henry Harland.
1894: Glasgow University, in a commitment to providing facilities for women students, invests in a new building designed by Mackintosh at Queen Margaret College.
1894, November: Work exhibited by The Four at the GSA’s Art Club is dubbed “ghoul-like” and “hideous” by detractors. The group is nicknamed “The Spook School.”
1895, March: Mackintosh exhibits his Beardsleyesque poster for the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. The poster designs are lampooned in the local media.
1895, May: Oscar Wilde is convicted of “committing gross indecency with certain male persons” and imprisoned. Beardsley, tarnished by association, is quickly removed as editor of The Yellow Book.
1895: Mackintosh designs Martyrs’ Public School for the School Board of Glasgow. Construction, fraught with delays, is completed in 1898.
1895: McNair resigns from the architectural firm of Honeyman & Keppie to set up his own studio on West George Street, not far from the Macdonald sisters’ new studio at 128 Hope Street.
1896, November: George Walton and Mackintosh undertake the interior decoration of Miss Cranston’s Buchanan Street Tearooms. Mackintosh designs three stenciled murals for the building. The Tearooms open the following May and become one of the sights of the city.
1897: Mackintosh designs Queen’s Cross Church in the Maryhill area of Glasgow. The architectural firm of Honeyman & Keppie wins the competition for the new GSA building; its submission is Mackintosh’s design. Construction of both buildings is completed in late 1899.
1898: Catherine Cranston transforms her first tearoom and the former hotel above it into her new five-floor Argyle Street Tearooms: The Crown Luncheon Rooms and Tearooms. Walton undertakes most of the interior decoration, and Mackintosh designs the furniture.
1898: Mackintosh’s first commission outside Scotland: a dining room for the Munich home of Hugo Bruckmann, editor of the German periodical Dekorative Kunst. Margaret Macdonald contributes metalwork panels.
1898: Jessie Marion King, now a GSA student, receives her first commission to design book covers for the Berlin publisher Globus Verlag.
1898: McNair is appointed Instructor in Decorative Design at the School of Architecture and Applied Art, University College, Liverpool. He holds the post until 1905.
1899, June 14: Frances Macdonald and James Herbert McNair wed in Dumbarton. They set up home together in Liverpool, in the northwest of England. After this they spell their surname as MacNair.
1900, August 2: Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald marry at St. Augustine’s Church, Dumbarton. Their marital home is an apartment at 120 Mains Street in the center of Glasgow.
1900: Mackintosh works on the designs for the Daily Record newspaper building in Glasgow and becomes sole designer for Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street Tearooms in the city’s busy financial district.
1900: Sylvan MacNair, the only child of Frances and James Herbert MacNair, is born. The Mackintoshes’ marriage will be childless.
