Hill House: options for the future

We’ve written previously about the history of changes and alterations at the Hill House. Perhaps the most dramatic change has been the erection of the Hill House Box, designed to protect the building from the elements. We wrote about the impact of the Box on water ingress, and what we’ve learned since it went up.

Now, we are considering the future of the Hill House and what our next steps should be. After careful research, we have been given four possible options:

1. Keep the Box, to protect the building from long-term damage from water ingress. We would also attempt to conserve as much of the external fabric of the building as possible.
2. Keep the Box, as above. However, instead of retaining the existing fabric of the white render, we could instead re-create the external fabric as closely to Mackintosh’s original design as possible.
3. Remove the Box and conserve the existing external fabric.
4. Remove the Box and restore the render according to Mackintosh’s original design.

This is the challenge of conserving built heritage: buildings age. Weather and other external factors damage them. Human interaction with them creates wear and tear. We could simply take buildings into our care and allow them to naturally degrade – but every other approach requires a choice. We must choose either to maintain or restore; when to intervene and when to allow weathering. As we wrote about in our first story in this series, the Hill House has changed and evolved over its life. If we were to return the building to an earlier condition, which ‘version’ of the building is the correct one?

The Hill House Box has proved a divisive approach. Some visitors long to see the Hill House as it was, surrounded only by the cool Scottish air and its lovely gardens. Others have found the Box inspiring. The structure allows visitors novel ways to view the building. Walking around it on elevated walkways, you can appreciate the clean lines of Mackintosh’s design in radical new ways. The Box itself has won several architectural awards, which raises the question of the merit of the Box as its own structure. The current Box was designed to last for up to 10 years – so what becomes of it after this?

The question remains: to keep or not to keep? And should we restore the Hill House back to Mackintosh’s original design, or attempt to retain as much of the existing render as possible? We are still considering our options. But if you have a passionate opinion, we would love to hear about it via our social media channels.

The continued work to conserve and care for the Hill House is made possible, in part, thanks to the Getty Foundation’s Keeping It Modern grant. Since 2014, Keeping It Modern has supported 77 grant projects of outstanding architectural significance that contribute to advancing conservation practice.