Since the late 1930s, the house has been in eclipse - used first as a girl’s private school, then as offices for the organisation now known as English Nature. Paradoxically, this twilight existence worked in its favour: the tenants boarded up gorgeous fireplaces and pushed filing cabinets against panelled walls, but changed very little. Had it remained a family house in full use, chances are it would have been modernised at intervals, the original interiors wrecked. As it is, by the time the Kendal-based Lakeland Arts Trust got interested in it in 1997, it was run-down, a bit bashed about, but essentially intact.
Today when you go there, you wonder why on earth it wasn’t brought out of hiding sooner. Set high on a hillside overlooking Windermere, with the Coniston Fells in the distance, it is a glorious location. Inside, the rooms flow into each other in a way reminiscent of early Frank Lloyd Wright in the American Mid-West. However, the main impact is comparable to the one you get on entering Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s justly famed (and slightly later) Hill House outside Glasgow: you are in a lost world, the world of the arts-conscious fin-de-siecle business magnate. A world of wealth, craftsmanship, optimism: a stratum of society that was to be devastated by the First World War. Sir Edward Holt, Baillie Scott’s client here, was no exception. His eldest son died in the trenches and this grand holiday home, containing painful memories, lost its appeal for the family.
If Scott is less well known than some of his contemporaries, it was partly his own doing, and partly an accident of history. He was a reticent man. He looked like the gentleman farmer he originally trained to be (his family owned sheep ranches in Australia). Becoming an architect instead was a sound career move - less orthodox was his decision to begin his professional career on the Isle of Man. Such early self-imposed exile helped him develop a very personal style. Later he shifted his base around the English provinces, only finally settling in London in 1919. Scott designed nothing but homes, and became famous for them. He became adept at winning competitions, beating Mackintosh on a couple of occasions. He built in Switzerland and Germany as well as Britain.
As for posterity, a fire destroyed all his drawings and records in 1911, and everything subsequently was destroyed by a bomb in the London Blitz of 1941. An architect without an archive is hard to place, is little published: only the buildings, and not all of those, survive. Such twists of fate have served to make Scott more invisible than most. Which is why Blackwell - now, belatedly, a Grade 1 listed building - will come as a revelation to many.
