Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born in the East End of Glasgow in 1868. He lived and worked in the city for much of his life, and it was during his studies at the Glasgow School of Art that he met his wife, Margaret MacDonald.
The pair formed a close artistic collaboration and together with Margaret’s sister Frances, and her husband Herbert MacNair, became known as ‘The Four’. As was advocated at the school at the time, the group worked cross-disciplinarily, producing designs in many mediums, from furniture to textiles.
Mackintosh is best known for his astoundingly unique and innovative architectural style. Celebrated today as a leading pioneer of modernism, he developed a distinctive vernacular which absorbed traditional Scottish architecture, elements of modernist utilitarianism, and the understated, functional design of Japan, newly opened to the West. His designs, which also embraced natural forms, like his famous ‘rose’, as well as the mechanisation of the industrial revolution, influenced the Art Nouveau movement on the Continent. Here his work was met with great acclaim during the eighth Vienna Secession Exhibition in 1900.
Catherine Cranston's Commissions
Two commissions from the entrepreneur Catherine Cranston boosted Mackintosh’s early career. In 1896, he designed the interior of the Glasgow Buchanan Street Tea Rooms together with designer George Walton. Then in 1898 the pair were commissioned to furnish Miss Cranston’s new tearooms on Argyle Street, Glasgow. Here however their roles were reversed, with Mackintosh fully in charge of the furnishings whilst Walton was preoccupied with designing the interiors. Walton had just opened his new offices in London and his involvement with new projects there probably curtailed his capacity to design the furniture for Argyle Street. This second Cranston commission afforded Mackintosh a new freedom to experiment, whilst leading to further projects, including the Ingram Street Tea Rooms (1900) and the Willow Tea Rooms (1903). Miss Cranston, along with other small, private patrons remained important sources of income for Mackintosh throughout his career.
In 1903‑04, after working on the Willow Tearooms in Glasgow for Miss Cranston, Mackintosh was invited to redecorate and refurbish her home ‘Hous’hill’ (Hill House), on the city’s outskirts. At this time Mackintosh was in an innovative phase of creativity: experimenting with new materials, textures and forms, and how these contrasting elements could work coherently within a particular space. The ideas manifested at Hous’hill would inform future furniture designs and interiors, culminating in the commission for the second phase of The Glasgow School of Art in 1910.
Prior to his work on Hous’hill, many of Mackintosh’s interior schemes were white: elegant, white‑painted furniture curated in open white spaces, decorated with flashes of coloured glass or stencilled roses. Whilst white interiors were also employed at Hous’hill, in the Blue Bedroom the furniture was typically stained or waxed, thus visually breaking up an ordinary rectangular room. Stylised organic forms and Glasgow rose motifs were used sparingly; photographs and preliminary plans of the bedroom indicate that decoration of this kind was minimal and largely reserved for the stained glass on carefully positioned basket lamps.
