The House
The Ballroom and Drawing-Room
On 7th November 1905, Sir James and
Lady Miller gave their first and only ball at
Manderston to celebrate the completion of their
new house. It was a sumptuous occasion. Antique
tapestries decorated the ballroom, drawing-room
and the marquees on the terrace.
In these interconnecting rooms, Adam would have used the filigree borders to outline the chimney pieces, but Kinross ran friezes all round the cornice, dado rail and down the corners. The opulence of Louis XVI was successfully married with the restrained Adam style.
Charles Mellier and Co., the fashionable firm
of decorators, who had already furnished the
Millers’ London home in Grosvenor Square,
supplied furniture to be grouped around the
walls in a formal Georgian style. Scott Morton
and Co., the Edinburgh cabinet-makers,
furnished the rest of the house with details
recorded in their filing books. The decoration
was in primrose and white, Sir James’s racing
colours.
The walls of the ballroom are hung
with silk embossed with velvet and the curtains
are woven in gold and silver thread. The rich
materials have lasted well thanks to careful
protection. These two rooms have rarely seen
the light of day and until about 1960, the walls
were covered and the curtains put into bags,
when the rooms were not in use.
The Ballroom
The central ceiling
panel painted, signed and dated by Robert Hope
in 1905, represents the sun god Apollo with
Cupids: the long panels depict Venus, goddess
of love, in different scenes and the corner
roundels are filled with cherubs. Above the
fireplace is a portrait of Nancye Bailie, Lord
Palmer’s grandmother, painted by G. Hillyard
Swinstead, when she came to Manderston as a
bride in 1921. The porcelain on the mantelpiece
is nineteenth-century Meissen; on the opposite
wall is a painting by Norman Heppel of Eleanor
Bailie, the pianist and aunt of Lord Palmer.
The chandeliers are of Italian crystal.
The Drawing-Room
The
drawing-room is reached by two sets of
beautifully made double doors. Behind them is
another of Manderston’s secret places, a hidden
passage, which leads on to a false loggia which,
in turn, leads to the gardens.
The drawing-room is the first of three rooms which have survived from the earlier Georgian house. The only structural alteration made in the drawing-room was to extend the shape of the bay by the double doors. It was completely redecorated in the sumptuous style of the house. Once again, the materials are of the highest available quality, white silk for the curtains, bordered with turquoise, and white silk brocade for the walls.
The embroidered seats on the three Louis XVI
chairs in front of the fireplace were worked by
Lord Palmer’s great-grandmother, Amy. His
grandmother, Nancye Bailie, worked the
exquisite embroidery on corded silk on the
four chairs opposite the fireplace during the
1939–1945 war years. The ceiling colours are
the same as those chosen by Adam for the
library ceiling at eighteenth-century Mellerstain,
the nearest Adam mansion to Manderston.
