At Mount Stuart, the Marquess of Bute built a Franco-Venetian marvel – with a Gothic swimming pool
Here we go with the King and the Queen of houses, rolled into one glorious whole. Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute in Scotland is difficult, if not impossible, to beat for electric beauty. The first sight of it makes you yell out loud with delight and then, the more you explore its quite extraordinary strength and individuality, go on shouting with pleasure.
A mixture of Venetian, French and Spanish Gothic, it is so very extraordinary and unexpected that you can barely believe what stands before you.
It was rebuilt by the 3rd Marquess of Bute after a fire in 1879. He employed Robert Rowand Anderson as his architect and was largely responsible for the house’s sumptuous interior himself, most meticulously supervising the brilliance of the artist and artisans over 20 years.
Lord Bute was an exceptionally serious and scholarly man of remarkable abilities – a romantic and a mystic, an astrologer, a historian, a theologian and an archaeologist, who wove all his erudition into his passion for building.
And what a passion it was; I have always found it impossible to run his equal to ground.
From an early age, he had shown little conformity. Sir Herbert Maxwell wrote of the 21-year-old Lord Bute being encouraged – in vain – to pursue country activities:
‘I retain an impression of him shivering in a woodland ride, the ground being covered with snow. He had on his feet a pair of patent leather shoes, and under his arm a gun which he knew not how to handle. I don’t think that he ever went out shooting again.
‘He used to amuse us by coming to the smoking room at night arrayed in a gorgeous flowing robe modelled after the pattern and colour of a saint’s mantle, as depicted in a stained-glass window of the school chapel at Harrow. If I remember aright, it was sky-blue silk lined with violet and enriched with plenty of broad gold lace.’
Having created the ‘medieval’ wonders of Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch in Wales, he set to work on Mount Stuart, with verve and passion.
He was obsessed with medievalism, most particularly when he was influenced by William Burges, the king of such fine artistic sensibilities but, at Mount Stuart, the schemes were often to his own designs.
Walk into the Marble Hall and you are overwhelmed by its vast magnitude – so extraordinarily beautiful that you are left quite breathless by its wonder. It’s 60 feet square and 80 feet high, with a wealth of gleaming marble and brilliant stained glass that rushes up to a central vault emblazoned with the constellations.
A vaulted gallery marches round with a translucent boss to each vault, surrounded by muses with bejewelled stars in their hair, all lighting you up as you walk beneath them, surrounded by a wealth of glittering detail.
The entire hall shines most brilliantly with the colours of the glass, with the signs of the zodiac and with mythological figures and creatures charging through waves of scarlet, purple and blue. It was all designed by Horatio Walter Lonsdale.
Mount Stuart is a dazzling example of 19th-century eclecticism laced through with the bravado of the day.
Lord Bute built an immense white marble chapel, larger than most parish churches, always permanently aglow with the blood-red hues of its clerestory glass.
Both Lord Bute and William Frame also designed exhaustingly elaborate ceilings throughout the building.
Most intoxicating of all in the house is the vaulted Gothic swimming pool – which furthermore is heated! Up you glide, through the water as if swimming up the aisle of a parish church. To this day, I will never ever forget the quite magical sensation of swimming around the stone pillars.
Incidentally, this was also the first house in Scotland to have electricity.
Lord Bute died in 1900, before all the work on the great house was carried out. But, joy of joys, it was taken up again in the 1980s, with a magnificent power and strength that haven’t faded to this day. Hurray, hurray!
Of considerable interest is the mosaic detailing on the east front of the house, inspired by St Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kiev.
A new and efficient arrangement has now been established for visitors to enjoy the house, the gardens and the wondrous chapel.
For years, the last but one Lord Bute had always been active in encouraging a host of young craftsmen from all over Scotland and was involved with companies of furniture-makers, stonemasons, woodcarvers and textile-designers.
His firm, the Edinburgh Tapestry Company, was up-to-the-minute modern, with a range of tapestries for PepsiCo, with designs by Frank Stella.
Today the house is proudly open to the public, with the richest wealth of interest to be nosed out round every corner.
What about one of Shakespeare’s First Folios in the 25,000-book library – discovered to be here in 1916?
When I first went to Mount Stuart, I had the immense good fortune of staying for a week. What a huge delight it was to walk up and down the great marble staircase and round all the extraordinary rooms alone at night, always surrounded by a wild magnitude of decoration. The 8th Marquess is now on the go, with the house open to all, loved and looked after.
