Recording Your Heritage Online
Event ID 565000
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Recording Your Heritage Online
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/565000
Double Villa, 25 and 25a Mansionhouse Road, 1856, Alexander Thomson
As a developer, 'Greek' Thomson prepared a feuing plan for Langside in 1853 and this was the only house he built here. Unique asymmetrical plan, with separate entrance porches on opposite sides, designed to look like single large villa. Squared rubble, ashlar dressings and incised Greek and Egyptian detail under shallow-pitch broad-eaved slate roof. Responding to the change in relative importance of the dining room, now as much used as the drawing room for business entertaining, Thomson designed a new type of continuous glass window behind a freestanding stone colonade at the dining room. This was his first experiment in what could be called an inside-out curtain wall. His interior decoration for these rooms, with elaborate cornices and pine-panelled walls, included a 'sun' ceiling in the dining room and a 'moon' ceiling at the first-floor drawing room. Decoration restored at no 25a, 1995, Alexander Page and Mark Baines.
Taken from "Greater Glasgow: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Sam Small, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk
