A Palladian Revival

In the second of two articles, Roger White explains how Scottish expertise and craftsmanship lie behind the remarkable and stylish revival of this outstanding property

- Roger White

When the irascible Sir Hugh Hume Campbell, 3rd earl of Marchmont, died in 1794, the splendid mansion he had built passed to the descendants of his sister (who assumed the name hume Campbell). As we saw last week, this was an unexpected inheritance; from 1780, he had quarrelled with his son and disowned his youngest daughter and grandson.

The last of his sister’s heirs to own Marchmont house, Sir John hume Campbell inherited as a teenager in 1894. he proved to have expensive tastes—notably keeping two packs of foxhounds—and these progressively eroded his patrimony. As a result, in 1912, he was forced to put the Marchmont estate on the market.

The buyer was a wealthy Edinburgh lawyer called Robert Finnie Mcewen, whose resources were swelled by inheriting money created in Brazil. not only did he feel that Marchmont was too small, but it lacked a number of the amenities considered important in the opulent country-house world before the First World War—as exemplified, indeed, by Manderston house a few miles away, luxuriously remodelled in 1902–5.

In 1914, he called in the leading Scottish architect of the day, Sir Robert Lorimer, who carried out far-reaching alterations even as war raged. externally, two of them were particularly significant, namely the removal of the external stairs that led the visitor directly up to the elevated principal floor or piano nobile, in favour of a ground floor entrance hall and the remodelling of the low-pitched Georgian roof to allow for the insertion of additional servants’ rooms. The new roofline was given a central accent in the form of a rather dainty cupola (Fig 1).