Opposites attract Scottish house buyers

Whether you’re looking for a historic or contemporary property, there’s something for every taste north of the border

- Penny Churchill

FROM medieval castles and towers to Classical mansions and grand 19th-century Scottish Baronial houses, Scotland boasts a remarkable choice of distinct architectural styles. However, in the case of Category A-listed Gribloch at Kippen in Stirlingshire, for which Savills (0141–222 5875) seek ‘offers over £1.5 million’, buyers from the UK and overseas have been queuing to view an Art Deco masterpiece that is the ‘polar opposite’ of most Scottish country houses, reports selling agent Andrew Perratt.

Built in 1938–39, Gribloch House is one of three private houses in Scotland designed by Basil Spence in the years before the Second World War, when the architect was a partner in the Edinburgh practice of Rowand Anderson, Paul & Partners. The house was built for steel magnate John Colville and his Californian wife, Helen, and named after the neighbouring moorland, which was one of Colville’s favourite picnic spots.

‘There can be few houses in the British Isles that command a finer or more extensive panorama than Gribloch,’ Arthur Oswald later wrote in COUNTRY LIFE (January 12/19, 1951). This was ‘a house planned for outlook’—its moorland site, some 12 miles west of Stirling, was chosen for its magnificent views of the Grampians, ‘spread across the north-west horizon in what seems one continuous range from the peak of Ben Lomond prominent to the westward as far as Ben Vorlich, with the Ochills showing up away to the east’.