Recording Your Heritage Online
Event ID 563947
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Recording Your Heritage Online
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/563947
Dunecht House, 1820, John Smith; 1859, W Smith, G E Street. Architecture as the working out of strong intellectual imperatives: a rare and potent example of strength of conviction allied to enormous wealth. Began as neo-Greek, two-storey, basement and attic square block for William Forbes, as replacement for Housedale, the 18th-century mansion whose remains still survive to the north. In 1845 the seventh Earl of Balcarres bought the house as a Scottish seat for his family, the Lindsays, who had been amassing wealth from the Lancashire coalfields. Three years later the house
was conveyed to his heir, Lord Lindsay, the polymath book-collector and author of 'Sketches of the History of Christian Art'. William Smith was commissioned, 1855-9, to produce a large two-storey, coursed granite extension to west, over a
deep basement (forms south side of present court), a l00ft-long gallery with rooms to south and remodelling of the old house with 'porte-cochère', belvedere over entrance, bay windows ('porte-cochère' removed to lochside, 1877) and an emphatic four-storey Italianate tower at junction with old house. The south front is particularly striking, with tall, blind arches, balustrades and extravagantly chequered top parapet. Lord Lindsay's concern for fire-proofing led to the use throughout of rolled-iron floor joists; the remodelling of the old house included the insertion of a grand square staircase decorated by Italian artists with Raphaelesque figures and scenes.
George Edmund Street was commissioned in 1867 to design a great library and chapel. The intellectually pre-Raphaelite Lindsay had chosen an arch Gothic revivalist who responded with two extraordinary spaces. The 120ft-long library is of
railway-station proportions, but in the nonpejorative sense, in that these were the cathedrals of the Victorian age. Avast iron-framed space, barrel-vaulted with roof lights and lined with two great galleries, it contains a most spectacular
chimneypiece in Italian marbles. The chapel is equally stunning, a colossal barrel-vaulted expanse, 50ft high, 100ft long, French-Italian Romanesque with great round arch to chancel. Not created without much heartache, caused by Street's
assertion of total supervision.
Death of Lord Lindsay abroad in 1880 halted building work. Theft of his body from vault under new chapel, 1881, led to advertising of estate for sale in 1886, eventually sold, 1900, to AC Pirie of Craibstone, who employed G Bennet Mitchell (then of Davidson & Garden Advocates) to design additions to house (new dining room, conservatory) and a large scheme of estate improvements. Estate let in 1907 to Lord Cowdray who purchased it, 1912, and commissioned Sir
Aston Webb to make extensive additions, 1913-20 (Bennet Mitchell dining room and conservatory removed, boiler-house wing, gates and lodges, terraces, loggia, gazebo, 1913, with early Italian Renaissance doorpiece etc). Further internal
changes, c.1924-32, William Kelly. Library, never filled with Lindsay's incunabula, became ballroom.
Dunecht Lodge, 1820, John Smith, single-storey, temple-form with Doric front, harled with granite dressings and broad eaves.
Taken from "Aberdeenshire: Donside and Strathbogie - An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Ian Shepherd, 2006. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk
