Scott, Mackay Hugh Baillie

Scott, Mackay Hugh Baillie (1865–1945). British architect. He was articled to Charles Edward Davis (1827–1902), City Architect of Bath. In 1889 he moved to Douglas, IoMan, and in 1893 established his own practice, specializing in domestic architecture that used vernacular motifs, influenced partly by American work, notably in the Shingle style, and partly by Voysey. In 1895 he began to publish articles on house-design in The Studio which brought him to public notice, and his work caught the attention of Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse (reigned 1892–1918, who employed Scott to decorate and furnish the main rooms of his house at Darmstadt (1897). In 1901 he won the highest award in the House of an Art-Lover competition organized by Koch, and published in Meister der Innenkunst (Master of Interior Design—1902)—Mackintosh was awarded a special prize in the same competition. More commissions followed, including Blackwell, Bowness, Westmd. (1898–9), the White Lodge, Wantage, Berks. (1898–9), and the White House, Helensburgh, Scotland (1899–1900). He built several model dwellings at Letchworth Garden City, Herts., Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, and Gidea Park, Essex, and his work was published and praised by Muthesius in 1904. Other designs include Bill House, Selsey-on-Sea, Sussex (1907), Undershaw, Guildford, Surrey (1908–9), and Home Close, Sibford Ferris, Oxon. (1910). Probably his best house, with garden and furnishings, was Waldbühl, Uzwil, Switzerland (1908–14).

Scott was essentially an Arts-and-Crafts architect, drawing on the domestic vernacular architecture of England, and his best works were probably those produced between 1901 and 1911, when he seems to have been influenced by Lutyens. His planning was ingenious, with spaces freely flowing into each other, and he designed fitted furniture to reduce clutter. This, with his tendency to simplify the exterior treatment of his buildings, gained him a spurious reputation as a proto-Modernist, but this is nonsense, as is clear from his Houses and Gardens (1906 and 1933) in which his ideas are cogently expressed. From 1919 he worked in partnership with Arthur Edgar Beresford (1880–1952), with whom he collaborated on the second edition of Houses and Gardens that specifically denounces the International Modernism Pevsner and others claim he ‘pioneered’.

Bibliography

Architectural Review, cxxxviii/826 (Dec. 1965), 456–8;
Creese (1992);
Dinsmoor & and Muthesius (1985);
DW, xxiv (1937), 140–53;
Haigh (1995);
Jervis (1984);
A. (of Darmstadt) Koch (1902);
Kornwolf (1972);
Me. Miller (1992, 2002);
Miller & and Gray (1992);
H. Muthesius (1979);
H. Muthesius (ed.) (1910);
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004);
M. H. B. Scott (1906, 1910);
Slater (1995)