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Publication Account

Date 2008

Event ID 1019595

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1019595

With the closure of Hailes Quarry Sir Thomas Gibson-Carmichael was forced to sell his house and estate at Castlecraig and he approached Robert Lorimer to design a substantial country house for him. The resulting proposal, however, was too expensive, and a modest late eighteenth century farmhouse and barn on the south side of the green in Skirling was acquired. Lorimer passed the commission for the conversion of the house to his assistant, Ramsay Traquair, who was setting up in private practice. Traquair was the son of the artist Phoebe Traquair, who had studied enamelling with and was a friend of Lady Gibson-Carmichael. Traquair designed and built the house between 1908 –12, adding a new corridor on two levels to ease the circulation, converted the barn into a drawing room with Skirling House a Florentine ceiling dated 1590 and provided a new wing of service rooms on the southwest. Sir Thomas was a keen amateur metalworker and, with Thomas Hadden, decorated the house with art metalwork, including fish door-latches, beast-inhabited railings and light fittings. The garden was provided with a wide variety of decorative features including a sundial, a wellhead and iron stakes decorated with flowers.

The house and garden are a rare example of craftsmen, designers, architects and artists working together. Ramsay Traquair went on to teach and build in Canada exporting a particular Scottish form of the Arts and Crafts Movement to North America. The house and the people involved in its creation would feature in the proposed AHRC project, exploring Scottish domestic architecture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and its relationship to the Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland.

Information from ‘The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, Commissioners’ Field Meeting 2008'.

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