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Glenlair House is the perfect place to celebrate as a family at Christmas
‘The appeal of this beautiful country house, apart from its stunning location, is its links with the celebrated physicist James Clerk Maxwell’
It would be impossible to restore Glenlair House in Dumfries and Galloway, and complete madness to even attempt it – wouldn’t it? Step forward one mad man and his family and just look at the results.
‘It started with my grandfather, who’d been in India running a tea plantation,’ recalls Angus Ferguson. ‘He returned to Scotland in 1950 when Glenlair came on the market, and he and my grandmother bought it.’
The appeal of this beautiful country house, apart from its stunning location, is its links with the celebrated Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. The founding stone had been laid in 1831 by his father, whose great ambitions for the house were never realised – though he did leave a time capsule that can still be seen today. Although he was born in Edinburgh, Maxwell was brought up at Glenlair, near the village of Corsock, and it appears to have inspired many of his findings. Returning as an adult in 1868, he carried out the first extension to the house, adding the front wing, and when he died in 1879, the house was passed to a cousin who extended it further, adding a servants’ wing, a billiards room and cellars in 1884.
A fire in 1929, which began in the kitchen and quickly spread to the rest of the house, had a devastating impact. Although the occupants managed to save some of their smaller possessions, by the time the fire brigade arrived from Dumfries it was too late for the building. It was a salutary lesson to the surrounding landowners who had recently resisted appeals to fund an additional fire crew for the area.
When Angus’s grandparents bought Glenlair House in 1950 it was in a pretty poor state. ‘It at least had a tin roof so the walls were fairly well protected, but when my grandfather approached the council about restoring it, he was told he’d have to dismantle the whole building because of the fire damage. So my grandparents moved into the cottage beside it and left the house alone.
‘When my father moved here in the early 1990s, he decided to try to restore the servants’ wing of the house, so that my grandmother
‘We wondered if we developed Demijohn enough, would there be a way for us to get back to Glenlair?’
could live there, while he and my mother moved into the cottage. That was the start of the renovation process.’
The house was left to decay while Angus was growing up as the family were away for long periods accompanying his father who was in the Royal Navy. It was during a posting to Naples that the seeds of an idea for Angus’s future company were sown.
‘We bought our wine from cantinas and every time we ran out we simply refilled our containers,’ he recalls. ‘After university, where I did a degree in product design, I joined the Black Watch, which involved further travel. In 2000, when I married Frances, our first posting was to Germany. The way people purchased and served food and drink at the markets gave me even more ideas. So when I retired from the Black Watch in 2004, we founded Demijohn, the world’s first liquid deli.’
As the Demijohn concept – where customers could fill (and refill) a bottle with a fine selection of liqueurs, spirits, olive oils and fruit vinegars – grew in popularity, with branches being established in Edinburgh, Glasgow, York and Oxford, the Fergusons’ lives were settling down. ‘We were living in Kinross but both my parents and Frances’s were in Dumfries, and we had three children who wanted to spend more time with their grandparents. We wondered if
we developed Demijohn enough, would there be a way for us to get back to Glenlair? Could we move the head office down to Dumfries & Galloway by making more use of the farm with its abundance of fruit and space?’
In the meantime, Angus’s father had started the Maxwell at Glenlair Trust which, by 2006, had raised enough money to start securing the original entrance area to the main house.
‘For my entire life we had looked at this ruinous bit of the house and thought: no, you’d be mad to even try to fix this, it would cost an impossible amount of money. But building techniques have changed and it was suddenly no longer necessary to dismantle the entire building.
‘About three or four years ago, with the funds from our house sale, we consulted an architect, who drew up plans to restore a reasonable chunk of the house. This was the central 1830s section, which would link to the renovations my dad made to the servants’ wing in 1994.’
The Fergusons put the project out to tender and a local company, T. Graham Builders, came in with a reasonable quote. Budget dictated that the family live on site while the work took place, which was a very tight squeeze, but it allowed Frances to manage the project so Angus could keep Demijohn going.
Work began in August 2013 and finished in May 2014 – an incredibly fast turnaround,
‘For my entire life we had looked at this ruinous bit of the house and thought: no, you’d be mad to even try to fix this’
considering two weeks alone had to be spent clearing out rubble and cutting down the trees growing out of the ruin. Angus is full of praise for the ‘excellent team’ of builders.
Today, with six bedrooms, a drawing room, dining room, family room, numerous bathrooms and a kitchen with a walk-in pantry nicknamed the village shop, Glenlair is a stylish country home filled with the bustle of family life. It really comes into its own at Christmas, says Frances. ‘I always try to grab a moment late on Christmas Eve to sit in the drawing room with a warming Demijohn spiced rum and just the tree lit. The next day is a wonderful assembly of extended family – since restoring the house we’ve loved playing host. And preparing the Christmas lunch is helped along with a Kir made with one of our wonderfully fruity liqueurs, such as a Rhubarb Bellini or a Morello Fizz.’
You get a hint of the size of the project the family took on when you peek through the dining-room door. It leads to a derelict tower, originally housing a drawing room, bedroom and wash house. ‘We’ll do that bit when we win the lottery,’ laughs Angus. ‘I deliberately left a door through to this area as I’d like to create an open-air courtyard with a pizza oven where the fireplace was.’
Mad? Perhaps a little. Ambitious? Definitely. But you can’t argue with the results.