The House
The Hall
Kinross was inspired in his designs by Robert
Adam’s interiors at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire,
where Lady Miller had been raised, and where
Sir James proposed to her. The fireplace and
its elaborate stucco is an almost exact copy
of that in the hall at Kedleston. More often
Kinross worked in the spirit of, rather than
copied Adam, as in the plasterwork below the
dome, executed – as were all the ceilings in the
house – by French and Italian stuccoists, brought
over specially for the purpose. The hall was
just a grand space designed to impress.
The spaciousness of Manderston with large ante-rooms to the main rooms is distinctively Edwardian. An eighteenth-century house would have had a much simpler layout. The floor is of inlaid marble, typical of the rich, expensive materials used throughout the house. Facing the entrance are Louis XV pot-bellied bombe commodes veneered in kingwood. Opposite the fireplace is a reproduction of a fourteenth-century Venetian trousseau chest with portraits of the bride and groom, whose possessions it would have contained, on either end.
The Ante-room to the Drawing Room
This ante-room, opposite the stairwell,
contains the pipes of the organ at the foot of the
stairs. Made in 1910, their oak case was modelled
on Adam’s design for an instrument in Sir Watkin
Williams Wynn’s house in London. In the
Edwardian period it was fashionable to have an
organ in the hall and Manderston was very
up-to-date. The organ has been lovingly restored
by Mr William Hutcheson and is played regularly.
The Library
This room was originally intended as a
‘writing-room’. SirJames died in 1906, just three
months after the house was finished, from
pneumonia exacerbated by hunting on a cold
January day. At the insistence of her brothers,
his widow, Lady Miller, put the billiard table,
an essential plaything for every Edwardian
gentleman, in the library.
The crimson silk damask on the walls gives it the necessary masculine feeling. The ceiling is the closest to Adam’s own style in the house, perhaps because it was the first room to be decorated. The bookcases support busts which were inspired by those at Kedleston and represent American Presidents, (left to right) Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The second panel of the principal bookcase is false, cunningly concealing a door to the hall.
