It has a movie theater, an eight-door Aga, a leather ceiling, a gold-rimmed eye, an open fireplace, and broken TV screens on the walls. Our writers visit the radiant giant on the beautiful shores of Lake Awe.
It was a sunny evening on the beautiful banks of Loch Awe, in the depths of the Scottish Highlands, and something sparkled behind the trees. Along a winding dirt road, past acres of lush pines, we came to a clearing where clusters of chiselled gray masses rose out of the landscape like outcrops of rock, glittering in the light with their rough sides, as if hewn from some crystalline mineral.
“It’s covered in broken TV screens,” said Merrikel, the architect of one of the more unusual castles built in Argyll since the 1600s. “We thought about using sheets of green slate to make the building look like a country gentleman in tweed standing on a hill. But then we found out how much our client hates TV, so this material seemed perfect to him.”
From afar, it looks like a pebble, or Harlem, as they call it here. But as you approach this monolithic gray matter, its walls are covered in thick blocks of glass recycled from old cathode ray tube screens. It appears to have been mined from a future e-waste geologic layer, a precious deposit from the Anthropocene period.
This is one of the many whimsical details of the 650-square-meter home, designed as the autobiography of clients David and Margaret, who run a family of six children and six grandchildren. “It can seem like a luxury to have a house this size,” said financial consultant David, who showed me seven en-suite bedrooms, one of which was designed as a grandchildren’s bedroom with eight bunk beds. “But we fill it regularly.”
Like most castles, it took a long time to build. The couple, who had lived in Quarier’s Village near Glasgow for many years, bought the 40 ha (100 acres) site in 2007 for £250,000 after seeing it on a property supplement in a local newspaper. This is former Forestry Commission land with permission to build a hut. “They came to me with a picture of a noble palace,” Kerr said. “They wanted a 12,000-square-foot house with a large party basement and room for an 18-foot Christmas tree. It had to be symmetrical.”
Kerr’s practice, Denizen Works, isn’t the first place you look for the new baron’s mansion. But he was recommended by two friends, based on a modern house he designed for his parents on the island of Tire in the Hebrides. A series of vaulted rooms built on the ruins of a farm won the Grand Designs Home of the Year award in 2014. “We started by talking about the history of Scottish architecture,” Kerr said, “from Iron Age brooches [dry stone roundhouses] and defensive towers to Baron Pyle and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Eight years later they got the most asymmetrical house, half the size, no basement.”
It’s an abrupt arrival, but the building conveys a rugged mountain spirit that somehow feels one with the place. It stands on a lake with a tenacious defensive position, like a solid fortress, as if ready to repulse a bandit clan. From the west, you can see the echo of the tower, in the form of a strong 10-meter turret (contrary to common sense, crowned with a cinema hall), and much more in the window slits and deep chamfers. there are many castle allusions on the walls.
The inner part of the incision, accurately cut with a scalpel, is represented by smaller pieces of glass, as if exposing the softer inner substance. Although it was built from a prefabricated timber frame and then wrapped in cinder blocks, Kerr describes the shape as “carved from a solid block”, citing the Basque artist Eduardo Chillida, whose cubic marble sculptures, which are carved sections, provided inspiration. Seen from the south, the house is a low-rise house set into the landscape, with bedrooms adjoining the right side, where there are reed beds or small lakes to filter wastewater from septic tanks.
The building is cleverly positioned around him almost imperceptibly, but some are still dumbfounded. When his visualization was first published in the local media, readers didn’t hold back. “Looks like an idiot. Confusing and clumsy,” wrote one of them. “It all looks a bit like the Atlantic Wall in 1944,” said another. “I’m all for modern architecture,” wrote one of them on a local Facebook group, “but it looks like something my little boy created in Minecraft.”
Cole was unwavering. “It sparked a healthy debate, which is a good thing,” he said, adding that Tyree’s house initially generated a similar reaction. David agrees: “We didn’t design it to impress other people. This is what we wanted.”
Their flavor is definitely one of a kind, as shown inside. In addition to their hatred of television, the couple also despised the fully equipped kitchen. In the main kitchen, there is nothing but a huge eight-door Aga set against polished stainless steel walls, a countertop, and a silver-plated food cabinet. Functional elements – a sink, dishwasher, sideboard – are enclosed in a small kitchen on one side, and a refrigerator with a freezer is completely located in the utility room on the other side of the house. At the very least, milk for a cup of coffee is useful for counting steps.
In the center of the house is a large central hall almost six meters high. This is a theater space whose walls are littered with irregularly shaped windows that offer views from the platform above, including a small print the size of a child. “Kids love to run,” David said, adding that the house’s two staircases create a kind of circular walk.
In short, the main reason the room is huge is to accommodate the huge Christmas tree that is cut from the forest every year and fixed in a funnel in the floor (soon to be covered by a decorative bronze manhole cover). Matching round openings in the ceiling, lined with gold leaf, cast warm light into the large room, while the walls are covered in earthy plasters mixed with grains of gold mica for a subtle shimmer.
The polished concrete floors also contain tiny mirror fragments that, even on overcast days, bring the crystalline sheen of the exterior walls into the interior. It’s a brilliant prelude to the most brilliant room yet to be redecorated: a whiskey sanctuary, a recessed bar entirely clad in burnished copper. “Rosebank is my favorite,” says David, referring to the lowland single malt distillery that closed in 1993 (although it will reopen next year). “What interests me is that for every bottle I drink, there is one less bottle in the world.”
The taste of the couple extends to the furniture. Some of these rooms are specially designed based on artwork commissioned by the Southern Guild, a boutique design gallery based in Cape Town, South Africa. For example, the towering barrel-vaulted dining room had to be paired with a four-meter black steel table overlooking the lake. It is illuminated by a spectacular black and gray chandelier with long movable spokes, reminiscent of crossed swords or horns, which can be found in the halls of a noble castle.
Similarly, the living room is designed around a large leather L-shaped sofa that faces not the TV but a large open fireplace, one of four in the house. Another fireplace can be found outside, creating a cozy nook on the ground floor patio, semi-shaded so you can warm up while watching the “dry” weather from the lake.
The bathrooms continue the polished copper theme, including one with a pair of bathtubs next to each other – romantic but mostly enjoyed by grandchildren who love to play by watching their reflection on the mirrored copper ceiling. There’s more of an autobiographical flair in the little seating nooks throughout the house, upholstered in purple leather from the Muirhead tannery (leather supplier to the House of Lords and Concord).
The skin even extends to the ceiling in the library, where books include Donald Trump’s How to Get Rich and Winnie the Pooh’s Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, named after the property. But all is not what it seems. Pressing on the spine of the book, in an unexpected moment of Scooby-Doo farce, the entire bookcase flips over, revealing a cabinet hidden behind it.
In a sense, this sums up the whole project: the house is a deeply idiosyncratic reflection of the customer, shaping the heaviness of the heights on the outside and hiding the satirical fun, decadence and mischief inside. Try not to get lost on your way to the refrigerator.