Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 to 1928) was a Glasgow architect and designer. His buildings, furniture and interiors, and above all his leaded glass, gave Scotland its own version of early twentieth century design, and the style is still copied on front doors and windows all over Britain.
Mackintosh sites map
Most of Mackintosh’s surviving work is in and around Glasgow. The first map shows the central Glasgow sites, and the second adds the ones further afield. Pins in red link to a page on this site, and the table below lists every site with what to look for.
Central Glasgow. Red pins link to a page on this site. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Mackintosh sites beyond Glasgow. His ashes were scattered off the French coast at Port-Vendres, which is beyond this map.
| Site | What to see | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Willow Tearooms, Glasgow | Leaded glass double doors and a high frieze of coloured, mirrored and leaded glass in the Room de Luxe (1903). | Restored between 2014 and 2018. Read more |
| House for an Art Lover, Glasgow | Interiors completed in 1996 from Mackintosh’s 1901 competition drawings, including leaded glass and a rose window. | Read more |
| The Mackintosh House, Hunterian, Glasgow | The reassembled interior of 6 Florentine Terrace, the home of Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald from 1906 to 1914. | Inside the University’s Hunterian Art Gallery. |
| Queen’s Cross Church, Glasgow | The only church Mackintosh designed that was built. | |
| Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow | Described as the largest permanent display of Mackintosh and Glasgow Style objects. | |
| Scotland Street School Museum, Glasgow | Designed 1903 to 1906 for 1,250 children; now a museum of school life. | |
| The Lighthouse, Glasgow | The former Glasgow Herald building, now a centre for architecture and design. | |
| Glasgow School of Art | The Mackintosh Building is a burned-out shell after fires in 2014 and 2018. It has not been demolished, and its future is undecided. | Read the full story |
| Hill House, Helensburgh | Built 1902 to 1904 for the publisher Walter Blackie, now sheltered inside a protective conservation box. | Read more |
| V&A Dundee | The Oak Room, rescued from Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tearoom in Glasgow and restored in 2015 to 2018. | |
| 78 Derngate, Northampton | Mackintosh’s remodelling of a terraced house in 1916 to 1917, his last major commission and the only place outside Scotland where his mature interior style can be seen in its original setting. | Read more |
| Port-Vendres, France | Where his ashes were scattered over the Mediterranean in 1928, from a rock he had painted, as he had wished. | He died in London on 10 December 1928 and was cremated at Golders Green. |
See also the Scottish stained glass trail and the wider stained glass tour of the UK.
Early life and training
Mackintosh was born on 7 June 1868 in Townhead, Glasgow, the fourth of eleven children. His father, William, was a senior clerk and superintendent in the city police, and the family spelled the name McIntosh at first. Charles settled on Mackintosh around 1893. The family moved to Dennistoun when he was ten, and he stayed at Allan Glen’s Institution until about fifteen.
At sixteen, in 1884, he was apprenticed to the architect John Hutchinson and started evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art, where he won prizes. He joined the Glasgow firm Honeyman and Keppie in 1889 as a draughtsman and designer, became a partner in 1901 and left in 1913 to set up on his own.
Margaret Macdonald and The Four
He met Margaret Macdonald at the art school around 1892. She, her sister Frances and Herbert MacNair worked so closely with Charles that they became known as The Four, and their long, thin, stylised plants are the heart of what became the Glasgow Style. Charles and Margaret married on 22 August 1900. They had no children, and her gesso panels and decorative schemes did more to shape his interiors than he is usually given credit for.
The Glasgow Style
The Four were part of a wider Glasgow Style, Scotland’s version of Art Nouveau, which ran from the 1890s to about 1910. It borrowed from the Celtic revival, the Arts and Crafts movement and Japanese design, and its tall, thin, stylised figures were mocked at the time as the “Spook School”. The Glasgow School of Art, under its director Francis Newbery, was the heart of it, and it was unusual in letting women study and teach. Margaret and Frances Macdonald, Jessie M. King, Ann Macbeth and Jessie Wylie Newbery are often now called the Glasgow Girls. When the Four showed their work at the Vienna Secession in 1900, designers in Austria and Germany took notice.
The Mackintosh rose
The shape people most link with him is the stylised rose: a round bloom drawn in a few curved lines, often on a long stem and set against hard vertical and horizontal bars. In glass it is leaded, with the rose in pink, green or clear glass and the straight lines carried by the lead itself. The result is lighter and more graphic than Victorian coloured glass, and it is why Mackintosh-style leaded lights, overlay stained glass and etched glass are so popular for front doors and internal doors, and the same shapes appear in the leaded lights gallery.
Where to see his work
Glasgow has most of it. Three of the buildings below have their own pages, with photographs of the glass.
- Hill House in Helensburgh, a family house for the publisher Walter Blackie, 1902 to 1904.
- The Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street, 1903, for Catherine Cranston.
- House for an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park, designed in 1901 and built in the 1990s.
- 78 Derngate in Northampton, a Georgian house he remodelled for a model maker in 1916 and 1917. It has not yet been photographed for this site.
There is more beyond those four.
Glasgow School of Art
The art school made his name. Newbery picked him for the job, and building began in 1897 with a gift of £10,000 from the Bellahouston Trust. The first half opened in 1899 and the second half, with the library, was finished in 1909. A fire on 23 May 2014 destroyed the library, when expanding foam used near a hot projector caught light, but most of the building was saved, and restoration began in 2016. On 15 June 2018 a second fire was far worse, gutting most of the inside, and in 2022 the fire service said it could not establish a cause. In July 2026 the school said it could not pay for a full rebuild alone, and the future of the burned-out shell is undecided. Read the full story.
Queen’s Cross Church
His only church, in Maryhill, was commissioned in 1896 by the Free Church of St Matthew, and John Honeyman passed the job to Mackintosh, then a young member of the firm. It opened on 10 September 1899. The tower is based on a church at Merriott in Somerset that he had sketched in 1895, and inside there are carved birds, insects and plants and two stained glass windows. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society has looked after it since 1977 and bought it in 1999.
Windyhill and Scotland Street School
Windyhill, in Kilmacolm, was built for the provisions merchant William Davidson in 1900 and 1901. It is a harled L-shaped house with small deep-set windows, and Walter Blackie went to see it before he asked Mackintosh to design Hill House. It is still a private home. Scotland Street School in Glasgow (1903 to 1906) has two stair towers in a Scottish castle style and a tiled drill hall, and it became a museum of school life in 1990.
Other buildings
He also designed the old Glasgow Herald offices in Mitchell Street, which are now The Lighthouse, and the former Daily Record building. After his death, the Artist’s Cottage and two other houses at Farr, near Inverness, were built in the 1990s from drawings he made in 1901.
Later life
Work dried up after 1913. In 1914 the couple moved to Walberswick in Suffolk, where he was briefly arrested in 1915 as a suspected German spy. By 1923 they were living at Port-Vendres in the south of France, where he mostly painted watercolours. They returned to London in 1927 because he was ill with tongue cancer, and he died on 10 December 1928, aged 60.
How his reputation recovered
He died with little money and his name faded for decades. The revival was slow. Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture in 1990 helped, and a big exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1996 helped more. He was on the Clydesdale Bank £100 note in 2009, a collection of his designs sold at auction for £1.3 million in 2012, and in 2018 the Oak Room from Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tea rooms was rebuilt at V&A Dundee.
Why it matters for stained glass
Mackintosh did not use glass as a picture. He used it as a pattern held together by lead, and he made the lead lines part of the design. That makes his work a good lesson in how leaded lights work: the strength of the line, the choice of a few small areas of colour, and the clear glass around them that lets daylight in. It is also why his style translates so well to other techniques, including overlay stained glass and sandblasted glass.
Buildings photographed for this site
The glass has been photographed at Hill House, the Willow Tea Rooms and House for an Art Lover, and each has its own page. There is also a page on 78 Derngate in Northampton, which has not yet been photographed.
The Mackintosh statue
A bronze statue of Mackintosh seated beside one of his tall chairs now stands in Glasgow. The plaque beside it says it was sculpted by Andy Scott, commissioned by Sanctuary Group and unveiled on 10 December 2018, the 90th anniversary of his death. Someone has put a traffic cone on its head, in the Glasgow tradition.
Other artists
Mackintosh was one of several designers who rethought glass around 1900. See also Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Comfort Tiffany, John La Farge and Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, or browse all artists.
Sources and further reading
Questions people ask
Was Mackintosh a stained glass artist?
He was mainly an architect and designer, but glass was a key part of his interiors, and he designed the leaded panels in many of his buildings along with the furniture and light fittings around them.
What is a Mackintosh rose?
A stylised rose made of a few curved lines, usually on a long stem. It appears in glass, metalwork, furniture and textiles associated with Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald.
Where can Mackintosh glass be seen?
Glasgow has more of his work than anywhere else. Besides the Willow Tea Rooms and House for an Art Lover, the Hunterian in Glasgow holds the reassembled Mackintosh House, Hill House is in Helensburgh and 78 Derngate is in Northampton. The map at the top of this page shows each site.
For the wider story, see Stained Glass from the Gothic Revival to the Twentieth Century and A Short History of Stained Glass.