In the Purple Drawing Room At Mount Stuart «

In the Purple Drawing Room At Mount Stuart

Wednesday 8th June 2016

So at last we were before Mount Stuart. We were privately mini-bus-ed down from the Visitor Centre which it turned out was designed by a friend of Bruce McBain’s. Then privately ensconced in the purple drawing, ours exclusively for the duration of our time at Mount Stuart, our lunch venue, our coat and bag drop, our coffee source and home. It wasn’t quite purple, as banter, spilling in from our own mini-bus van, was quick to point out. Later, banter, in the presence of staff, took a different turn and staff were reduced to heaps of grey ash.

Do you know Mount Stuart? You cross over on the ferry to the Isle of Bute to see it. It is the favourite of the Laird and Lucinda Lambton, a massive high Gothic palace of the late Victorian time, vast, monumental, fantastic and seething with detail. Also a bit Italian with its loggia around the top. The Marquis of Bute was the richest man in the world at the time. Money was never mentioned throughout the building of the place. He was also a laudanum addict, as was the architect. So the whole place therefore is very possibly a drug trip rendered in stone and marble. Without Mount Stuart is strange and unsettling: it is hard to imagine what could be within. There is a closed-off quality, and bizarre outbursts on the facade of balconies and bay windows, with a sideways-on conservatory on the 1st floor and the open loggia round the top, as already mentioned, which creates an area of darkness immediately underneath the roof when seen from below – a weird blank where everything else is so explicit.

Within are sumptuous marbles of every kind, a forest of gothic arches, stained glass casting hallucinatory light in alarming hues, hieroglyphs, astrological signs, pagan iconography, mice carved with other creatures in the capitals, mirrors, reflections, distortions. The visitor might wonder: where am I? What leads to where? Which staircase is this? Subsequent owners have tried to make the house…well… more homely. But this isn’t quite the point. There can be no other life in this house than the life of the house itself. So arsenic green and royal purple, quoin-ed ceilings, gold and wood panelling, carving, carving, carving – there’s no arguing with it. It’s huge and tiny and surely not charming or gracious. Perhaps even a touch of madness but there’s nothing like it. As The Laird said of another house nearby open to the public, ‘Well, it’s very splendid but it’s just a house…’