Rowantreehill

Built in 1898, a red-roofed, half-timbered Tudor villa perched on tall castle-like walls of solid sandstone. James Salmon (1873-1924), whose family home it was, successfully unites English and Scots precedent in an idiosyncratic fusion of divergent fin-de-siècle fashions. But there is more. Strange ironwork ‘gargoyle’ features, shaped rafter ends, a distinctly Art Nouveau doorway and, in the interior, a newel post carved in the form of an eponymous salmon. A cloakroom, added by James Miller (1860-1947) below the soaring chimney in the south-east re-entrant, barely diminishes the building’s powerful vertical thrust.