Continuing the Arts and Crafts theme, I came across this extraordinary house while researching my book on Scottish architect James Miller. ‘Kildonan House’ was commissioned by 21-year-old London-based Scot, David Euan Wallace in 1913, following his marriage to Edina Sackville. A few years earlier he had inherited around £2m pounds and the 15,000-acre Kildonan Estate, on the condition that he lived there. He commissioned James Miller to demolish the existing estate house and to design something that would make life in Ayrshire more bearable for him and his new wife. This vast house, which is probably Miller’s finest, was completed in 1923 at a cost of £73,500 and is both the largest country house to be built in Scotland in the 20th century and one of the least known.
By the time it was ready for occupation, the Euan Wallaces were divorced (Edina going on to marry a further 4 times and gain infamy in ‘Happy Valley’ in Kenya) while David, rather bizarrely, had married Barbara, the eldest daughter of Sir Edwin Lutyens. There is certainly more than a hint of Lutyens in Miller’s design, with Little Thakeham providing the two-storey hexagonal bay window, the internal balcony to the hall and the tall diagonal chimney stacks, while the great double-height glazed bay and arched entrance door from Deanery Garden are also re-employed, along with the triple-gabled entrance wing from Lutyens’ Tigbourne Court. To further cement the link, the great Gertrude Jekyll was commissioned to create the gardens in the 1920’s.
The few accounts of the history of the house suggest it was largely obsolete by the time of its completion, but it was in fact used throughout the 20’s and 30’s both for regular shooting parties and as a holiday home for the Wallace boys when they were home from boarding school. Wallace eventually sold the house and its estate in 1937 and, having served as a hospital in WW II, it was bought and run as a convent school by the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny until the 1970’s. Since then, it has struggled on, firstly as a hotel and more recently as self-catering apartments, but now stands secured but abandoned and sadly, now officially a ‘Building at Risk’. Let’s hope this Grade A Listed Building finds a saviour soon.
If you want to read the full story of Kildonan House, my book on James Miller and John Burnet is due to be published by Whittles Publishing this Autumn, and if you don’t want to miss out on further blogs then please follow me on johngooldstewart.com
John Stewart 