Mackintosh's WHITE rooms

"the architect/ designer eventually becomes the painter."

"There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist"









"In 1904 Mackintosh was commissioned by Catherine Cranston and her husband to remodel and furnish their house at Hous'hill. It was the last domestic commission that of any consequence which Mackintosh received in Glasgow, and developments of the new style he began here can only be seen in the work at Northampton carried out ten years later.

Included in the commission were two bedrooms, the Blue Bedroom for Miss Cranston and her husband furnished in oak, and the White Bedroom, a guest room, where all the furniture except two small chairs was painted in white.

Mackintosh had started to paint his bedrooms white in 1898 at Westdel, Glasgow, and he continued to use white in all the until bedrooms he designed until 1904. The white painted is usually associated with shapes or decoration inspired organic forms -- leaves, tendrils, roses and petals. The Hous'hill furniture, however, is predominately linear and geometric in form and decoration.

It is the rationalisation of a process of simplification in Mackintosh's designs for furniture which had, begun the previous year in The Hill House, Helensburgh.

After he left Scotland in 1913 he did very little more work, and in 1920 he gave up architecture and devoted the remainder of his life to painting.


(text taken from here)




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