Accessibility

Font Size

100% 150% 200%

Background Colour

Default Contrast
Close Reset

Recording Your Heritage Online

Event ID 566413

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Recording Your Heritage Online

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/566413

Ardtornish House, Alexander Ross, 1884-90 Thomas Valentine Smith's thumping great mansionhouse, built to replace his father's more modest-scaled shooting lodge, survives with virtually all its original fittings and much original furniture in situ, despite having been subdivided as holiday apartments. Riding high above wooded policies at the head of Loch Aline, its batteries of chimney stacks and Germanic towers are an arresting sight. Beneath this eclectic roofscape, the house is a loosely T-plan arrangement of heavily barge-boarded gabled ranges with mullioned windows and chunky piend-roofed dormers, girdled about the midriff with an iron and glass verandah. The external cladding of thinly coursed local sandstone disguises the early fireproof construction of shuttered "no fines" concrete and steel beams. A crescent of louvred game larders at the foot of a cliff encloses the service court to the rear. John Kinross's internal remodelling of 1908-10 replaced much of Ross's work in a richly eclectic mix of late 17th-through to late 18thcentury Revival decoration. The oak panelled drawing room has Grinling Gibbons-style panels carved by Thomas Beveridge, the business room ceiling richly modelled 17thcentury- style plasterwork, and the superb main staircase luxuriantly carved foliage in the c.1700 manner of Sudbury Hall. Kinross enlivened Ross's trabeated ceilings with plasterwork and introduced other decoration in the Adam Revival style. On the first floor, the boudoir ceiling is decorated with classical reliefs. Shades of Manderston - his flagship commission, which in turn echoed Kedleston - in the remodelled billiard room, and in the library, where the mahogany bookcases made by Morison & Co of Edinburgh are copies of ones designed by Kinross at Manderston. Other high quality examples of furniture by Morison & Co, modelled on 18th-century patterns, remain in the house, along with good pieces by Gillow in the principal rooms, and more standard bedroom furniture by Wylie and Lochhead of Glasgow. Edwardian fittings and upholstery by the architectural decorators Scott Morton & Co survive remarkably intact, and a number of rooms still have their curtains and wallpaper dating from that period. Also notable is the excellent range of original domestic fixtures, and five splendid marble-lined bathrooms.

Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk

People and Organisations

References