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The Mackintosh House - Limited Access
Due to ongoing refurbishment, there is currently limited access to The Mackintosh House. The principal interiors - hall, dining room and studio-drawing room as well as the information room are open. As the upper floor and exhibition gallery are closed, admission is currently free.
It is recommended you phone 0141 330 5431 in advance of your visit for up-to-date information.
The Mackintosh House is a reconstruction of the principal interiors from the Glasgow home of the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) and the artist Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864-1933).
The couple lived at 78 Southpark Avenue (originally 6 Florentine Terrace) from 1906 to 1914. Substantial alterations were made in 1906 as Mackintosh remodelled the proportions and natural lighting of the Victorian end-of-terrace house. The principal interiors were decorated in his distinctive style, remarkable then, and now, for the disciplined austerity of the furnishings and decoration.
The house was purchased by the University of Glasgow in 1946. The generosity of the vendors, the Davidson family, led to the simultaneous gift of all of the original furniture. In 1963, the house, threatened by subsidence and next to land scheduled for redevelopment, was demolished. Prior to demolition, however, an extensive survey was made and all salvageable fitments removed to enable the future reconstruction of the hall, dining room, studio-drawing room and main bedroom. While the architects, Whitfield Partners, conceived The Mackintosh House as an integral part of the Hunterian Art Gallery, they took pains to ensure that the sequence of rooms exactly reflected the original. Virtually the same views and effects of natural light are enjoyed, as 78 Southpark Avenue stood only some 100 metres away. Other areas of the original house - cloakroom, kitchen, bathroom, and secondary bedrooms - have not been reconstructed.
The interiors, completed in 1981, have been furnished with the Mackintoshes' own furniture - all to Mackintosh's design - and decorated as closely as possible to the original. The selection of bric à brac, fitted carpets, curtains and other soft furnishings was based on contemporary descriptions of the house and photographs of Mackintosh interiors of the period.