Today, I took my mom and Martin and Lesa into City Centre where we checked out the architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, most famous native son of Glasgow. Mackintosh's art nouveau design incorporates images from nature (roses, birds in flight, trees) with geometric shapes and simple lines. He designed a number of buildings in Glasgow, including the Glasgow School of Art, the Willow Tea Room, and Scotland Street School. Of course, my carefully constructed walking tour, immediately went astray but what we ended up doing was just as fun!
I love this desk, which shows some of the elements of Mackintosh design with contrasting light and dark, stained glass, and natural images.
View from the top of the building
There is also the De Luxe Room which has a pink and purple color scheme with mirrored walls and stained glass doors for when you want the over-the-top tea experience.
We started off at The Lighthouse, a building Mackintosh helped design for the Glasgow Herald; it is now a design centre and museum.
A humorous sign indicating the direction to the toilets.
This sign was inside the bathrooms; my mom's guess was different handicaps -- pregnancy, missing legs, and mental illness -- though why the men, women and disabled toilet users all had to be warned about these handicaps is anyone's guess!
View from the top of the building
Internal spiral stairs that took you to the top of a tower
Lunch at The Willow Tea Room on Sauciehall Street continued our Mackintosh tour.
This Tea Room has two rooms, one with a more simple design and a mostly black and white color scheme.
There is also the De Luxe Room which has a pink and purple color scheme with mirrored walls and stained glass doors for when you want the over-the-top tea experience.
Quick dip into The Glasgow School of Art, where you can take a tour led by current art students or just check out the lobby and gallery space. Then a pause to admire the view atop the Garnethill neighborhood, where the elderly John Macbeth (at least, so he claimed his name to be) became our self-appointed tour guide, telling us about the mountains and glens in the distance and about his shopping (margarine spread and cheese), but mostly breathing whisky fumes on us. A true touch of local color!
Final stop The Tenement House, which is not strictly Mackintosh related, but a flat from the Victorian times, so the same era anyway. This is a fascinating National Trust property, as the mother and daughter who lived here kept most of their stuff over the years. The four room flat contains lots of artifacts from the time, including a pole to help make the bed (since people were too short to reach the far side of the beds build into the corners), a box commemorating Queen Victoria's Jubilee (we'll be here for the current queen's jubilee in June), and a pair of china dogs on the mantle (quite similar to the ones on our flat's mantle).
A great day culminating in a meal prepared for us by Martin, but that will have to wait for another post.
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