The Artist's Cottage project
[clarification needed] He also drew three preliminary sketches titled, Gate Lodge, Auchinbothie, Kilmalcolm,[2][3][4] and the final drawing for the completed building.
[5] Ninety years later the architect Robert Hamilton Macintyre and his client, Peter Tovell, began work on the first of these unrealised domestic designs, The Artist's Cottage, at Farr near Inverness, Scotland.
The plan footprint covers 230 square metres accommodating five en-suite bedrooms, a north-lit studio occupying half the first floor, a large roof terrace and public rooms appropriate for the scale of the building.
Exterior elements too, such as the artist blacksmith-work for the studio balcony and roof terrace, were fabricated to Mackintosh's specifications for other buildings, and applied to his elevations of vertical chimney stacks set against battered walls punctured by deeply pierced openings (illus).
The sculptural form of the completed building has been compared to some of Mackintosh's contemporary and later drawings and watercolours, such as The Castle, Holy Island, 1901 and Le Fort Maillert, 1927.
The Artist's Cottage was completed in 1992 to some considerable interest, with articles published by the CRM Society,[8] Country Life[9] and others, along with numerous press reports[10] and TV, film and bibliography (see below).
[16][17] Following the completion of The Artist's Cottage, Macintyre and Tovell turned their attention to Mackintosh's A Town House for an Artist, teaming up with gallery owner Ken Hardiman of Alder Arts (then of Church Street, Inverness) to form Mackintosh Galleries Ltd (27 March 1992), a Company dedicated to lobbying for the best use of Falcon Square, a derelict area of ground at the heart of Inverness.
[18][19] Macintyre, an established campaigner in civic redevelopment projects, proposed the unexecuted 3-storey A Town House for an Artist as centrepiece to an arts, heritage and tourist centre.
The principal details not shared with the main house are the round stair towers, the absence of dressed masonry to the entrances, and the deliberately contrary vertical walls with battered chimney stacks.
