HOME FROM HOME
Updating their 18th-century property for 21st-century living has been a real family affair for designers Lachlan and Annie Stewart
An interior designer’s house on the shores of Loch Alsh
were among the frontrunners of this approach to design.
Anta is now a well-known brand with three main retail outlets, in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Fearn. The latter is the site in Rossshire where the company’s workshops were originally situated. Annie heads up the retail side, which sells high-quality furniture, textiles and ceramics, all made locally using natural materials. Lachlan runs the architecture arm of the business and has been responsible for
reshaping and updating iconic Scottish buildings such as the Castle of Mey and the Black Watch Museum in Perth. He has also worked on many new projects, including the Queen Mother’s Memorial Garden at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
The Stewarts had already created one exceptional family home more than a decade ago, when they rebuilt Ballone Castle, a medieval fortress that sits on a spectacular peninsula at Portmahomack, overlooking the Moray Firth.
At Tulach Ard, the house where Lachlan was brought up and where his parents lived until 2011, the restoration was less daunting but it took astute sensitivity to modernise the house without destroying its integrity. The 18th-century building, with Victorian additions, had been the family home for almost 50 years, and not surprisingly is a repository of much affection and nostalgia.
At the time of the Ballone project, Annie and Lachlan’s eldest son, also called Lachlan, was still a child, living with his siblings and parents in a hut on the site, witnessing the extraordinary transformation as the castle rose from a pile of stones to become an imposing cliff-top residence. At Tulach Ard, young Lachlan, soon to be a fully qualified architect from Rhode Island School of Design, was brought in to contribute to the reshaping of his grandparents’ house, working closely with his parents to adapt the space.
‘ Lachlan has been responsible for reshaping and updating iconic Scottish buildings’
The external structure of the house has remained unchanged, but the ground-floor layout has been rejigged quite dramatically. As young Lachlan explains, the lochside front of the building used to consist of a sitting room, dining room and hall. All the dividing walls between these three have been removed to create one elegant stone-floored, ash-panelled living space, with slate fireplaces at either end. ‘I’ve been working with Michael Ronaldson at Caithness Flagstone Ltd at Spittal,’ he says. ‘Each fire surround is cut, using new water-jet technology, out of one large piece of slate threeand-a-half inches thick.’
As a reference to the original layout of the building, slate lines bisect the French limestone floor, showing where the old dividing walls used to be. Slate is also used as a border around the paler stone flooring and in place of wooden skirting at the base of the ash panelling. As well as looking good, this feature allows the floor to be easily washed without staining or damaging the wood.
‘You need a big room for major family gettogethers,’ says Annie, ‘but this open-plan space also has distinct areas that work in different ways. You can easily move the furniture around depending on how you want to use it.’
Time spent in both America and Scandinavia has informed and reinforced young Lachlan’s belief in the design qualities and beauty of wood. Rhode Island School of Design is in the New England town of Providence, famous for its wooden houses dating back to the 1700s. In Copenhagen, too, where he spent a semester, he learned much from the Scandinavians’ advocacy of this natural material. Not only is ash grained with very beautiful flowing striations, but it is easier to obtain in this country than oak and is more sustainable, since the tree is much faster-growing.
Making the house more environmentally friendly and ecologically sound meant making big changes to improve heat retention. All the wooden floors and joists on the ground floor had to be taken out and the earth below lined with ‘ hundreds of barrow-loads of concrete, mixed outside and trundled by manpower into the house – it was the only way to get it in’.
A ground-source heating system was installed
‘This openplan space also has distinct areas that work in different ways’
in the garden behind the house and the earth mounds resulting from this excavation were used to create terracing. The system supports underfloor heating throughout the ground floor of the house. In the main room the plaster walls were stripped back to the stonework and thermally lined behind the ash panelling.
Upstairs has remained unchanged structurally except for the addition of a bathroom. This was created out of an old study/dressing room, while a laundry cupboard became an extra washroom. The two upper floors have electric heaters and the walls are covered in Anta fabrics. ‘At the outset of our careers, when we were in our twenties, Lachie worked on the Plaza Theatre in London,’ says A nnie. ‘He lined the walls with Stroud Red – the felted red wool material used for hunting coats. The effect was so warm and welcoming when you piled in off a London street. The fabric also absorbed sound in a busy, noisy space, so it improved the acoustic effect. This gave me the idea of using textiles on walls at Anta and it works so well in this house too, particularly during the long Highland winter.’
Carpets, rugs and other Anta accessories mix well with the house’s antique furniture. ‘The Anta look is a contemporary, classic take on traditional Scottish design,’ says Annie. ‘It works well mixed with the old. That’s why it has stood the test of time.’ That’s also why it has worked at Tulach Ard, creating a comfortable, stylish home appropriate to today’s family life in the heart of the Highlands.
‘Making the house more environmentally and ecologically sound meant making big changes to improve heat retention’