Blackwell

Hessian wallcovering – rowan, harebells and daisies – in the dining room, designed by Baillie Scott

I caught the train to Windermere and walked* to Blackwell, the holiday home built by Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott for Sir Edward Holt, founder of the Holt Brewery in Manchester. It was completed in 1900 and is similar in many ways to Hill House in Helensburgh, built by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1902-4 for Walter Blackie. Both are Gesamtkunstwerke built on ridges overlooking water (Lake Windermere for Blackwell, the River Clyde for Hill House), and both depended on the railway for accessibility.

Hill House is idiosyncratically Mackintosh, whereas Blackwell is more obviously Arts and Crafts. The house has some very Elizabethan touches: the square windows with leaded lights, oak panelling (making those rooms oppressively dark for somewhere that attempts to bring the outside inside through the use of natural motifs on walls and in carvings – but I must remember this is pre-central heating and vacuum cleaners, and Lake District weather is not always beneficial to Lake District views), white gesso plasterwork on the ceiling and frieze above the dado rail like Hardwick Hall, and lots of inglenooks beside fireplaces.

The main hall has clear sub-divisions, along with a minstrel’s gallery that looks like a tree house. Progression through the ground-floor rooms is quite theatrical: you move along the low-ceilinged, dark corridor to the double-height hall and to the blindingly white drawing room.

Dining room fireplace with antique fireback and contemporary Delft tiles

Hall

Dining room

Dramatic change along the corridor

Drawing room

Drawing room

Not all of the interior and none of the furniture is original: like 78 Derngate, the house was used as a school for some years. (“A house was never taken good care of, Mr Shepherd observed, without a lady: he did not know, whether furniture might not be in danger of suffering as much where there was no lady, as where there were many children. A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world.”) Much of the original woodcarving remains, however, and there are still William de Morgan tiles in the fireplace surrounds.

It was a pleasure to walk around Blackwell (this is what the exterior looks like on a sunny day) and to admire the vision and craft on display, but – as someone who would definitely have been in the labouring classes in 1900 – I also find the Arts and Crafts ideals and hostility to mass production rather precious. The use of local materials and traditions sounds great – and the hessian for the wall-covering is fairly basic – but the focus on the overall design and the time spent on the producing the articles mean that it was only ever for rich people. Baillie Scott, for example, also designed a tree house for Princess Marie of Romania.

* Walking to Blackwell makes you realise that the Lake District is still shackled to the car. You walk along winding main roads which lack pavements in places. There’s no bus, and the cycle racks at Blackwell are sited at the furthest point from the entrance.