Dumfries House opens!

[Nemesis]

This Friday for the first public tours.

I have my place booked for the following week, was too late for the opening day.


http://www.savebritainsheritage.org

http://www.savebritainsheritage.org/sbh_pressrelease_dumfrieshouse_saved_270607.pdf


has the details of the rescue launched by SAVE


http://www.dumfries-house.org.uk/

more info on the website

 

[Nemesis]

And gosh a mill too (and an ice house):

Scotsman today:

National treasure: Dumfries House opens its doors



Date: 31 May 2008
By TIM CORNWELL
FOR 250 YEARS, Dumfries House – designed by the Adam brothers, furnished by Thomas Chippendale and owned by the earls of Bute – kept its glories to itself. But next week that's all about to change
In the pillared main hall of Dumfries House, blue and green dragons and sinuous black hunting dogs play among the gold ribbons and flowers of the rococo plasterwork. On the floor below, a team of conservationists is hard at work, polishing toilet seats. Dating from 1920 or before, the heavy mahogany seats come from lavish fitted bathrooms but, in the history of this house and its furniture, they are not high up the list of star pieces.

Just around the corner, in the white drawing room, standing on a 250-year-old carpet, is a Chippendale bookcase. It's a piece of furniture with a presence of its own, emanating power like a Tardis, rooted in its intimidating value of £4 million. "Bookcase" actually doesn't begin to describe it; it is officially a George II parcel-gild padouk and gilded limewood bookcase. It boasts delicate gilded finery across the panes of glass, a honeycomb-patterned veneer on the doors, with Venetian swirls of gold crests above.

In June last year, the Duke of Rothesay, Prince Charles, dramatically stepped in and forged a deal to buy this stately home in East Ayrshire for a staggering £45 million. It came two weeks before an auction that would have seen the house and its unique Chippendale and Scottish furnishings, original and intact from 1759, flogged to the far corners of the world. The furniture was expected to fetch at least £12 million.

Prince Charles recognised a wholesale cultural calamity in the offing and, rather than wringing his hands, brokered the deal with a £20 million loan. He was backed by the new First Minister, Alex Salmond, with the Scottish government putting up £5 million in funding.

The prince, in common with almost everyone else, had never seen Dumfries House; he got his first tour a few weeks later. For 11 years after the death of the Dowager Marchioness of Bute in 1993, a widow of the fifth Marquis of Bute for 40 years, it had been mothballed, home only to a caretaker and his wife.

In the months ahead that will change, as the Scottish public gains access for the very first time to the country's newest cultural attraction, a stately home unlike any other in Britain or the world. From next Friday, 6 June, buses will bring tours of about 20 at a time to the house. Accompanied by two guides, they will have the opportunity to marvel at the pink dining room, whose delicately shaded, intricate plasterwork fills the room with a rosy glow.

It boasts two breathtaking Chippendale mirrors, laced with gilt, with swirling candlesticks and Chinese figures, and topped by long-beaked ho-ho birds, and 22 dining chairs by the Edinburgh furniture-maker Alexander Peter.

Dumfries House is a purists' paradise. Designed by the Adam brothers for Lord Dumfries, the Palladian mansion has kept the clean-cut lines the Adam brothers drew up in 1753. The building was extended, but never cluttered. The same goes for the interior: the furniture by Thomas Chippendale and his Scottish contemporaries has stayed in the house, in the same rooms, and matches the original sales bills and inventory from 200 years ago.

For its entire existence, Dumfries House was a home, lived in rather than conserved. The Dowager Marchioness famously left cigarette holes in one Chippendale chair while she was watching the horse races. But the house became increasingly irrelevant to the Bute family, its owners, as they concentrated their interests on their main home, Mount Stuart, on the island of Bute, so it was put up for sale.

The man charged with Dumfries House's transformation from untouched jewel to major tourist attraction is Mike Schafer, hired from Culzean Castle, where he was property manager for three years. Like Prince Charles, he took the job without seeing the house. He is going from managing an internationally famous tourist attraction, with 400,000 visitors a year, to one that in its first year aims to draw a cautious 25,000 people, with just ten or 12 tours a day. It will never run to more than 40,000, because the house is considered too environmentally fragile, and even visitors' breath can drive up humidity levels.

"No-one's ever been here," Schafer says, sitting in an office where the Christie's auction lot labels can still be spotted around the room. "Culzean was the first country park in Scotland. This was a private house for 200 years. The contents that we have are just unique. There's no-one else in the world who can boast the furniture we have."

Since he arrived in January, Schafer has been working flat out to open Dumfries House on deadline. On the day we visit, a month before the first tourists are due, it is hard to see how he will pull it off. Guides have yet to be hired, their notes yet to be printed. But Schafer is about to launch a training programme for 60 people, with speed interviews at the same time, to pick those who would fit.

"It's not going to be perfect," he tells me. "But we will be open." Already, word has quietly spread; before any official opening date, more than 1,000 people have called to book visits, and dozens have offered to work as volunteers.

Schafer's road tour of the estate around the house begins at the Barony Colliery monument. The restored A-frame pit head of a coal mine towers over the East Ayrshire scenery, a reminder of where the Bute family's vast wealth originated.

Nearby, the road crews are flattening and clearing the lane being turned into Dumfries House's new entrance for tourists, which is safer than the current one on the dangerously busy A70.

The estate boasts beautiful parkland, but no paths to walk through. It is split by the Lugar River, crossed by a steeply arched John Adam bridge, but bits of the balustrade are in storage. The 2,000 acres include a walled garden overlooking the river, entirely abandoned and overgrown with trees, and a grove of towering redwoods, an 18th-century favourite. There's a derelict water-powered sawmill and the 1671 dovecote that is the estate's oldest building. They are all full of possibilities, in Schafer's eyes, for tourist draws beyond the house, and he even talks of stonemason or woodcutting schools.

"I think this property presents just as many opportunities as Culzean does," he says. "We will be able to hold some wonderful events here."

The Scottish government is pledging to stage functions at the house, but Schafer would also happily see its long quiet rooms echo with the sound of rock concerts in the vast meadow it overlooks.

"We had the Retrofest music festival at Culzean last year. This is a land of opportunity now, failure is not an option, and I intend to push as hard as I possibly can to make things work," he says. Appropriately, Dumfries House's first TV event will be Antiques Roadshow.

Prince Charles, using his other Scottish title, set up the Great Steward of Scotland's Dumfries House Trust to run the estate. On a parcel of land near Cumnock, he is planning a property development of eco-homes with echoes of his model village of Poundbury, in Dorset. If it goes well, proceeds from the venture could support Dumfries House.

The trust's key objective is to include local people as volunteers and paid guides among its 25-strong staff, and for the house to act as a generator for the local economy. The tea ladies of Onsite Services, which provides school dinners in East Ayrshire, will be in charge of light refreshments at the house. For now, it has neither restaurant nor shop.

But there's a distinct hard-headedness to Schafer's approach, from a man who makes it clear he is not an antiques expert. "As we develop the wider estate, to be all-inclusive is very important, because I think the house alone in ten years' time wouldn't stack up," he says. "You have to move the property along. I definitely aim to make it a family destination."

His innovations at Culzean included a second-hand bookshop that generated a phenomenal £60,000 in two years. "I am a commercial animal rather than a conservationist," he says, "but I enjoy walking that fine line between commercialism and conservation."

You do not have to be an antique dealer, or connoisseur, to love Dumfries House. When you move from the grandeur of the first floor to the bedrooms on the second, for example, each room is an individual gem, with a different style and colour scheme. The colours of paint and plasterwork take a 180-degree turn, from glistening yellow and white in one room to rich blues and greens in the next. Furniture goes from Chippendale's sumptuous and sophisticated workmanship to the simpler designs of the Scots.

It is as if Lord Dumfries had gone through the catalogue of the day and picked one of those, one of those and one of those. Which he more or less did; Chippendale won lasting fame with his Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, a design collection used widely by other furniture-makers. In one room a brilliant blue and gilt Chippendale four-poster bed is crowned with elaborate cornices and has a shower of fabric baubles hanging down. "They made two, and they don't know where the other went," remarks Schafer. There are chairs and stools to match. In the same room there's the Chippendale mirror, a perfect example of his rococo art, with a carpet panel of a basket of flowers.

Move next door and the bed is also dated 1759, but in this case it is the work of Alexander Peter, from Edinburgh. It appears much finer, more fragile, with a simple gold coronet over the canopy at the foot of the bed and the fabric a pale green, Wedgwood-style design. Peek in another, and a green-and-gold frame on the four-poster again sets the theme. It is almost as if the bedrooms, modestly sized and designed by the Adam brothers, are competing with each other.

When Christie's was commissioned to sell the contents of Dumfries House, it drew up two catalogues, each an inch thick, with 634 lots that went from a 22ft Georgian dining table to fire irons, crockery and a fine Victorian butter churn, a bargain at £100 to £150. It is staggering, seeing the furniture in the rooms it was built for, to imagine the house being emptied. The Bute family originally entered negotiations with the National Trust of Scotland to sell it, but agreement could not be reached.

As he prepares the grounds, the car park and the Portacabins, Schafer is also overseeing the conservation programme inside the house. Family guests once slept in beds that are now valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds, walked on 18th-century carpets and sat on original Chippendale fabrics, looked at themselves in mirrors worth millions – and opened windows and lit fires.

Windows are now being covered with conservation blinds, blue on the outside and white within, to reduce the light. Visitors will have their wet raincoats removed well away from the main rooms, while curators watch for the effect of their breath on humidity.

Schafer jokingly tells the story of the building's smelly ghost. "I believe it's one of the earls," he says. "There are certain places in the house where you can detect this. I was showing this group around one night and I knew this presence was there, and you could smell this strange smell. Everyone looked at me and I said, 'It's not me, this is the ghost.'"

A more serious haunting is the Hastings death carriage, the Hastings being a family into which the Butes married. Whenever anyone in the family died, it was said, a spectral carriage would appear. One was heard outside the house by the daughter of the third Marquis of Bute when he died in 1900, it is said.

Is there a risk that Dumfries House could be thought of, at least in its early stages, as only for antiques fans? "It's never been seen by the public; it really is a jewel," Schafer says. "Yes, you could say about the furniture, it is a specialised thing, but something of that beauty, everyone should see it once.

"For 250 years this place has been a virtual secret," he adds, "but we are now just starting to peel back the layers.

"We really want to stress that it's a work in progress, and we really won't get everything right in the first instance, but to bear with us and be patient. We are trying to do everything we possibly can to make it the best visitor experience you have ever had."

• Guided tours of Dumfries House, Cumnock, Ayrshire (info@dumfries-house.org.uk) will start on Friday, 6 June. Groups are limited to 18 people and must be pre-booked. To arrange a visit, tel: 01290 551111 or, to make an online booking, see http://www.dumfries-house.org.uk/book-now.asp
A slice of heritage, saved for the nation
Dumfries House was built between 1754 and 1760 by William Crighton-Dalrymple, the fifth Earl of Dumfries.

It was designed by the celebrated architect brothers John, Robert and James Adam. It is most famous for the intact Chippendale furnishings commissioned when the house was built, along with work by three top Edinburgh furniture-makers of the day, William Mathie, Alexander Peter and Francis Brodie.

There are about 50 pieces by Thomas Chippendale, including bookcases, chairs, beds and gilt mirrors, valued from hundreds of thousands to millions of pounds.

Whereas many antiques are of "Chippendale" style, the Dumfries House furnishings are backed by the original sales bills from Thomas Chippendale, the most famous furniture-maker in Britain and probably the world.

Last year the Marquess of Bute, Johnny Dumfries, whose family had acquired Dumfries House by marriage in the 19th century, put both house and furniture up for sale. Two weeks before the sale, the Prince of Wales underwrote a £45 million purchase with a £20 million loan.

The package included £9 million from the Sainsbury family's Monument Trust, £7 million from the UK's National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), £2.25 million from the Art Fund charity, and £1.5 million from other charities. Another £5 million came from the Scottish government.

 

[Nemesis]

Good article in the Times:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article4036468.ece

 

[Nemesis]

Guardian article and audio slideshow:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/31/scotland.heritage

 

[Nigel]

Nemisis

What did you think of Dumfries House, assuming you have visited by now?

The wife and I went on Saturday and were the only two at the 10:00am slot so we had the luxury of a personal tour. We thought it was fantastic and it was good to see the house and grounds early on before they bring in more commercial initiatives (which they will have to do, to cover costs). Our guide was very good and clearly had been well tutored as she spoke extensively about the furniture makers and the history of the house and occupants. The house has a lovely faded elegance about it inside (aside from the garish paint in the hall) and I hope they don't over restore and just stabilise (like Newhailes, another time capsule). The furniture was impressive but in particular we really liked the mirrors.

Just about the only thing that jarred was the ghastly blue stones added to the ornamental front garden, I am surprised Historic Scotland allowed that.

Interested in your views

 

[Nemesis]

Well, I loved it, the furniture magnificent, yet the whole thing actually on a far more 'domestic' scale, roomsize in the original Adam part than I had expected, but having been closely involved with the worry and every twist and turn of the plot to try to raise the cash to save it I would say that wouldn't I!

Was glad we avoided the first day, it was the official opening with HRH and invited worthies (some of whom I know, and that's not my sort of thing) alongside 'normal' tours, and rather crowded, and on Monday like you we were fortunate to have a small group at the 10.am slot - five of us - three local people and two of us. I agree re the guide, and it was good to be able to have some discussion too - I knew more about some aspects of the place than she did, although she was very well briefed, another person in our group's grandmother was brought up on the estate and had so many memories to share, and we had such a leisurely tour. Another group toured a short while later, and it was a much larger group, which I wouldn't have enjoyed so much. I gather coach tours had arrived from Ireland over the weekend.

It had been a desperate rush to get the road in, the car park, the loos, and have it finished and dressed for the opening I gather, (picture hanging, china displays, table setting etc were very last moment) with the small team getting up at 4.30 in the final days. There is much, much more to open yet. I liked having tea and sandwiches and cake provided too - once there is a caff it will be different, but it felt so personal. The teas were actually made by the local school dinner consortium. There was painting going on while we were touring, no doubt that will continue for a rather long time.

I will be returning soon for another visit, maybe early autumn, will concentrate then on the grounds - I have to say I didn't notice the blue stones, so there you go! Probably nothing much to do with Historic Scotland, really.

Did you get Marcus's guidebook? It is really rather good. Lovely pics, although the chapter on the saving of the place was a tad diplomatically glossed over in places.

We paid a return visit to Culzean Tuesday, another Adam gem on a much grander scale, and that had been managed (on behalf of the NTS) by the same chap who has taken on Dumfries House. Although yes there is of course the commercial stuff - caffs, a volunteer secondhand bookshop, plant sales, it is still wonderful (the gasworks was a particular joy) and I have hopes that Dumfries House will not be too commercialised. There is to be an HRH housing and other development to help pay for its upkeep, on the edge of Cumnock (a town in desperate need of regeneration) so that should help.

There is so much more that will hopefully eventually be made available to the public, including a mill I gather, and a chapel in one of the wings, and the grounds I have no doubt will be opened up more as time goes on. But I urge anyone who can to visit now, while it's still all newly opened and an exciting venture!

 

[Nigel]

Nemesis

Good point about the scale, the rooms were of a size that you could easily imagine living there yourself (the dining room was our favourite).

The grounds are well worth exploration - we had a good walk around and the land manager even took us on personal tour to the walled garden (we couldn't find it) - really just an overgrown walled field at present but massive.

Agree about Culzean, we go there often (we live in Ayr) and there is lots to do but yet it doesn't feel overly commerical (yes, the gas house is really interesting). I am not a huge fan of the baronial style though; Dumfries was prettier on the eye. We were lucky enough to win two nights B&B in the Eisenhower Suite in a draw, which was fun (but very expensive and not remotely value for money if you were paying to be honest).

If you haven't seen Newhailes on the outskirts of Edinburgh you should see it sometime, is is an amazing and charming early Georgian time capsule.

 

[Nemesis]

We have a great deal of Edinburgh and surroundings to visit , now that a good friend (Adam from SAVE) has taken over as Director of EWH, and so much on the list... Got a heap of books about historic buildings in Scotland to read. I know about Newhailes, but have not as yet been.

We stayed in Ayr (Travelodge .... sorry, but it was cheap... but we did make sure we ate in the town for our stay... ) and really enjoyed walking round there too. Yes in places a bit run down, but I don't mind that. The station hotel is wonderful, huge, and many a good building. I bought a book about the place, with walks, and intend a return visit.

We also visited the Batchelors' Club - Burns - and we were the only people there, had a fascinating tour of the tiny place with the guide, spent ages there.

I am ashamed to say that although we live in Northumberland we have neglected Scotland somewhat as a place to visit, partly because we have enough midges at home :lol: but intend from now on to spend far more time there. It's near and wonderful, stress free and beautiful journey, train or car.

 

[shelli]

Offers will be flooding your way from Scottish Tourist board to write their guide books Nem! could be a nice little earner

 

[Nemesis]

Nah - not when the likes of Marcus Binney will do it... :lol:

 

[Nemesis]

The interview is worth reading:

http://www.dumfries-house.org.uk/6th-june-art-fund.asp