Church Rate Corner is a late masterpiece of one of Britain’s greatest Arts-and-Crafts architects, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. He was born in 1865, in the same propitious decade as C. R. Mackintosh and Sir Edwin Lutyens, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright; architects who made their reputations with outstanding domestic architecture in the 1890s.
Baillie Scott’s path to success was indirect. His father made a fortune in Australia, then returned to Britain in 1860 as a wealthy man, marrying, and living in south-coast resorts. As the eldest son, Baillie Scott (Scott was his family name; Baillie the forename that he used professionally, perhaps to distinguish himself from the architectural dynasty founded by Sir Gilbert Scott), was expected to follow his father’s footsteps in the colonies. In preparation, he trained for two years at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, but, on graduation in 1885, he made a decisive break and began articles with C. E. Davis, city architect of Bath. This was his only architectural training.
After three years with Davis, in February 1889 Baillie Scott married Florence Kate Nash, his landlady’s daughter. The couple travelled to the Isle of Man for their honeymoon — and stayed for 12 years. Baillie Scott later said that he was so seasick going out that he couldn’t face the ferry journey back. More probably, he had no definite plans, Florence was pregnant (their daughter Enid was born in November 1889) and Baillie Scott picked up some work with a local surveyor on an ambitious residential development, before opening his own practice on the island in 1892. His first houses were in a vernacular cottage style, inspired by the work of Ernest George, which was widely published. Indeed, publications were the primary source of Baillie Scott’s architectural ‘literacy’, isolated as he was on the Isle of Man.
Baillie Scott’s originality was displayed in one of his first projects, the Red House, which he built for his own family in 1892–93. A distinctive feature was the use of demountable panels to divide the three ground-floor reception rooms — hall, drawing room and dining room — which allowed them to be unified on special occasions. Baillie Scott decried the conventional division of houses into small, boxy rooms, what he called the ‘mansion in miniature’.
Baillie Scott’s transformation from a provincial architect to an international celebrity began with a series of articles he wrote for The Studio, which reached a wide, non-technical audience. His first article came in January 1895, a 3,000-word essay describing ‘An Ideal Suburban House’. On the strength of these articles, he was not only commissioned to build the ‘Ideal’ house in Knutsford, Cheshire, his first project in England, but also interiors for the Grand Duke of Hesse at Darmstadt in the late 1890s and a treehouse for the Duke’s sister-in-law, Princess Marie of Romania. Success in the 1901 Haus eines Kunstfreundes (House for an Art Lover) competition further bolstered Baillie Scott’s reputation and he worked in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Russia.
In 1901, the architect and his family moved from the Isle of Man to Bedford. Initially, work was scarce and Baillie Scott wrote his book Houses and Gardens in 1906, setting out his ideas on domestic design and illustrating his early projects. In a 1933 edition of this lavish tome, he explained his understanding of the term domestic architect, ‘so-called, not, as the title seems to suggest, because he is a kind of family pet in contradistinction to his fierce and untamed brethren of the wild, but because he is primarily a designer of houses and cottages for people to live in and to provide a comfortable and inviting setting for their domestic life’.
In 1911, fire severely damaged his Bedford home and studio, destroying all the early records of his practice. His office closed during the First World War, but reopened afterwards with Edgar Beresford, previously his chief assistant, as a partner. Work was plentiful in the 1920s, but dried up in the 1930s and the practice shut at the outbreak of the Second World War. Its records were lost in the Blitz and Baillie Scott died in February 1945.
Church Rate Corner was designed in 1924 for Miss Marjorie Duckett. She knew of Baillie Scott because she previously lived in Storey’s Way, Cambridge, where he built five houses. The new house was to be her married home with Arthur Sewell, assistant secretary of the Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate, but he died in 1926 and, after she married again, Church Rate Corner was put on the market. It was purchased by Joan and Stanley Bennett, fellows of Girton and Emmanuel Colleges respectively, who remained for more than 50 years and brought up four children there. When Joan died in 1985, the house was sold to only its third owners, Michael Nedo and Gillian Moore, who have lovingly cared for the house and garden to the present day.
The delight of Church Rate Corner derives from the absence of any jarring or distracting features. Simplicity and restraint prevail. Early in his career, Baillie Scott’s handling of ornament in joinery, metalwork, plasterwork, stained glass and embroidery contributed greatly to his reputation. It was a talent he took to extremes at Waldbühl, a house begun in Switzerland in 1907 (Country Life, January, 17, 1991). After the First World War, however, his work assumed a new austerity. It is tempting to see this change as a response to the trauma of the conflict and in parallel with the austere simplicity of Britain’s war memorials. One wartime project, the restoration of a historic cottage in Great Chart, Kent, now called Baillie Hall, may also have influenced his ideas. ‘When modernising an old building,’ he wrote in 1933, ‘the architect should be chiefly commended for the things he omits to do. It is so often desirable to adopt a policy of masterly inactivity.’
What Church Rate Corner lacks in elaboration it gains in refinement. In Houses and Gardens, Baillie Scott had asserted that: ‘The house which, for want of a better word, we must continue to differentiate from the ordinary house as “artistic”, bases its claims not on its frillings and on its adornments, but on the very essence of its structure.’ Here, all the materials are of the best quality and used directly: wide timber boards for the ground-floor doors, the simplest rounded architraves, brick-edged fireplaces with separate oak mantle shelves, a solid balustrade for the stairs without turned bannisters, trowelled render externally and textured plaster internally.
There are exquisite details: the latches on the boarded timber doors (Fig 8), the window ironmongery and the candelabra, re-created by the present owners to Baillie Scott’s design, in the dining room (Fig 2) and breakfast room (former kitchen). The house also takes advantage of some technical advances in construction, a detail that distinguishes it from the purest tradition of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement. It makes use of steel rather than exposed oak for the first-floor beams, for example, cavity construction with a ventilated air gap for the external walls and a gravity-fed central heating system, which is still in operation. However, the innovations that Baillie Scott used were integrated with traditional construction methods.
Although it is close to the centre of Cambridge, Church Rate Corner has no street frontages. A driveway leads to a private garden-world that surrounds the house and the front door is almost hidden to the side of the building. The main façade addresses a garden amphitheatre backed by tall yew hedges, a treatment advocated in the 1933 edition of Houses and Gardens where Baillie Scott speaks of the importance of ‘enclosure’ and adds: ‘We need good backgrounds in the garden to display flowers to the best advantage. For this purpose there is nothing better than a hedge of English yew.’
The garden façade is almost — but deliberately not — symmetrical (Fig 1). It comprises a single range with deep, tiled roofs, brick chimneystacks and a commanding double gable. There are wooden window frames with rectangular leaded panes and the walls are rendered and limewashed. Within, the rooms are intimate in scale and every door opening aligns with a window looking onto the garden. Most rooms have two modestly sized windows (over-large ones were one of the architect’s pet hates), giving beautiful lighting and modelling.
There are no demountable screens or wide openings between the rooms at Church Rate Corner, another point of difference from his early houses. Rather, three distinct ground-floor rooms face south onto the garden — the study (all Baillie Scott’s Cambridge houses were designed for academics), the drawing room (Fig 4) and dining room. A pneumatic door kept kitchen smells at bay; a hook could hold it back for the family to walk to meals. On Baillie Scott’s drawing, the full-glazed bay window in the drawing room (Fig 5) has a masonry wall at low level like the other windows, but, somehow, a change was made. The glazed bay, which incorporates doors to either side giving easy access to the garden, is almost without parallel in Baillie Scott’s work, but greatly adds to the charm of the house.
In terms of planning, there is a simple division between bedrooms on the first floor and reception rooms below. Connecting the two is a timber staircase of striking simplicity (Fig 3). As originally designed, Church Rate Corner clearly distinguished between the family rooms facing the garden and the less favourably located kitchen and services for the servants. Today, however, the kitchen is the centre of family life and this change has been made at Church Rate Corner by connecting the former kitchen, scullery and larder together and adding a garden door (Fig 6). This sensitive work reflects the infinite pains taken by Dr Nedo, a meticulous editor of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s manuscripts, to preserve the character of the house (Fig 7).
His care extends to the furnishings, which are exactly in the spirit of Baillie Scott. These comprise a few, well-chosen pieces and occasional rugs laid on the polished, boarded floors. It is hard to imagine a more perfect realisation of Baillie Scott’s ideal of domestic harmony. Few, if any, of Baillie Scott’s many houses have been conserved in such a marvellous way and it is a happy circumstance, therefore, that this article corrects a curious anomaly; that Baillie Scott never published Church Rate Corner, which today possibly gives the most perfect impression of his aesthetic vision in later life.
Today, the only Baillie Scott building open to the public is at Blackwell, overlooking Windermere in the Lake District (Country Life, July 12, 2001). This is now a popular Arts-and-Crafts gallery run by the Lakeland Arts Trust and there is a personal connection between it and Church Rate Corner through my late wife, Diane Haigh. She was the conservation architect for the restoration of Church Rate Corner in 1992 and the project architect for the restoration of Blackwell in 1999–2001. She also restored a number of other privately owned Baillie Scott houses in Cambridge, the most recent completed in 2025 with Liz King as executive architect. This work underpinned her monograph on the architect, Baillie Scott: The Artistic House, which is soon to appear in a revised edition with substantial extracts from Baillie Scott’s engaging writings. He is an architect whose work deserves to be much better known.
'Baillie Scott: Architect and Author’ by Diane Haigh and William Fawcett is published by Lund Humphries (£50). A special exhibition about Baillie Scott at Blackwell, Cumbria, runs until March 20, 2027.