A decades-long project to save a house from 500 years of 'ungainly, hotch-potch extensions' and reveal its original beauty
Rescued from dereliction in the early 1990s and never previously described by Country Life, Balgone House in East Lothian has evolved from tower house to remarkable Classical seat, as Mary Miers explains. Photography by Will Pryce.
A few miles south of North Berwick, an outcrop of volcanic stone forms a series of dramatic cliffs within the gently rolling farmland of East Lothian. The picturesque qualities of the heughs, as this wooded ridge is known, have been exploited since the 18th century, but, in the mid 19th century, the landscape that forms the wider setting of Balgone House (Fig 1) was transformed. Two lakes and a carriage drive were made to create a highly scenic approach. The new drive ran for more than a mile from a baronial-style gate lodge, proceeding under the public road and along the lake at the foot of the cliffs, before arriving at the house from the north via a cutting through the escarpment. The policies were enhanced with walks and rides and an avenue planted to form a vista to the distant cone of North Berwick Law.
Given the ambition of these developments, Balgone House itself — home of Alan and Fidelity Dean — comes as a surprise. Rather than being rebuilt to a grand Victorian scheme, it was merely enlarged piecemeal with a hotch-potch of ungainly extensions, behind which the earlier house survived.
The present owners, Alan and Fidelity Dean, bought the property in 1989 and, with the help of their son, the Edinburgh architect Marcus Dean, set about lovingly reviving the derelict mansion, stripping back the Victorian excrescences to recover the house that had evolved from a 16th-century tower. The estate had not been entailed until 1852, before which its buildings were sparsely documented, so much of what can be ascertained about the house has come to light only as a result of this restoration.
Fig 2: The main stair was added as part of the 18th-century remodelling and redecorated in 1780–1800 with an Adam-style plaster ceiling. It occupies the central rear jamb.
The earliest reference to Balgone is a charter of 1565 confirming a gift of lands by Robert Lauder of Bass to his wife, Elizabeth Hay. Their son George inherited after his brother was murdered in 1579, but he fell into debt and the property passed through various hands, during which time it’s unlikely that any major works were implemented. In 1641, the lands of Craig and Balgone were incorporated into the free barony of Bass, ‘with the tower and manor place of Ballowgoun as the principal place for receiving sasine’, suggesting that by now the tower had a hall range and was a substantial residence.
In 1654, John Sempill, Writer to the Signet, acquired Balgone and it was separated from other lands to create a new barony (a Scottish title adhering to property rather than person). Inherited by Sempill’s young daughter Marion in 1662, it transferred to her husband, George Suttie, on their marriage in 1677. Suttie was a merchant burgess of Edinburgh with strong trading links to the Low Countries. A firm Royalist, he was granted one of the last baro-netcies of Nova Scotia by Queen Anne in 1702.
Fig 3: The east elevation, shorn of the Victorian additions to the right-hand extensions. The topiary pyramids were designed by Alan Dean.
The late 1670s, when he was newly married and resident in Edinburgh, would seem a favourable time to have embarked on improving Balgone and the tax paid on hearths suggests development at this period — by 1691, the house had 10. An indication of the scale of the house in 1715 is given in an antenuptial contract drawn up between James, the future 2nd Baronet, and Elizabeth Dalrymple, daughter of Sir Hew Dalrymple, Lord President of the Court of Session. By its terms, Suttie resigned his lands and baronies to his son, but was allocated ‘a dining room and two bedchambers and offices thereto belonging, being the three rooms lying in the south end of the third storrie with the hail furnishings’.
An estate survey of 1739 includes a sketch of the ‘mansionhouse’, depicting a long, rectangular building of uniform height, with a lower wing at right angles and the old stair tower projecting at the inner angle. Soon after this date, George, the 3rd Baronet, demolished the wing and remodelled the main range to create a symmetrical, nine-bay house with an enfilade of principal rooms on the first floor, the old tower subsumed into the south end. The stair tower was refashioned from circu-lar to square, with a polygonal upper stage, and a mirror image of it built to create a pair of ornamentally balustraded projections flanking the central three bays. That they contain spiral stairs, and that the low, bolection-moulded doorway could be late 17th century, is typical of Balgone’s idiosyncratic blend of the Scots vernacular with Classicism.
Fig 4: The kitchen, once the servants’ hall, as re-created in its original location in the tower house, with its deep-set fireplace opening.
No date is recorded for the remodelling, but in 1749, when stationed in Gibraltar, George asked for leave to arrange the fitting of a new roof to his house, ‘which otherwise will fall down’. It’s likely that his concern related to Balgone, where the big, square roof timbers are 18th century and the south gable was clearly refashioned following demolition of the wing. A few years later, George married Agnes Grant, which would have provided further impetus for his improvements.
Agnes was the middle daughter of William Grant, the Lord Advocate, who had bought the neighbouring Prestongrange estate in 1746 and took that name when he became a Lord of Session and Justiciary in 1754. Her younger sister, Jean, was married to Robert Dundas of nearby Arniston, one of William Adam’s finest houses. Balgone’s remodelling may have been modest by comparison — probably the work of a mason or wright — yet, although it stopped short of a pedimented frontage, it updated the house with a tripartite arrangement, the central block being flanked by pavilions on quadrant links enclosing a forecourt. The influence of Classical formality extended to the setting, where a tree-lined avenue was formed, leading to a semi-circular plantation on the cliff edge.
Fig 5: The drawing room, with salvaged parquet floor, barn-found chimneypiece and Queen Anne Revival fittings from a London house.
By 1798, the house had three extensions to the rear. Now reinstated, this east elevation is described by Jane Geddes in the Lothian volume of the ‘Buildings of Scotland’ (2024) as resembling ‘an ominous advancing naval flotilla… projecting in an E-plan from a vast expanse of naturally coloured rose-pink harling’ (Fig 3). The southernmost of these full-height extensions is vaulted on the ground and first floors, suggesting an offshoot contemporary with the tower house, a typical arrangement for accommodating closets and small chambers. The other two are 1740s, their gables crowstepped in a nod to the earlier jamb. The middle projection included a new staircase, its Adam-style plaster ceiling belonging to a second Georgian phase of about 1780–1800 (Fig 2). At about this time, the principal floor acquired larger, more elegant sash windows and some cornices were adapted with more delicate ornament. A carved marble chimneypiece was installed in the drawing room; it was reinstated by the Deans after they found it in a barn (Fig 5).
Much of the earlier Georgian detail survives, demonstrating how late the old-fashioned Scots-vernacular style lingered on in windows with thick astragals, timber cornices and architraves with chunky egg-and-dart and rope mouldings. A corner fireplace with an ogival overmantel is in the late-17th-century manner of William Bruce (Fig 7).
Fig 6: The second-floor study in the earliest rear extension. It was formerly used as a dressing room to the Oak Bedroom and features wood panelling of varying dates.
A chamber in the south-east jamb presents a particular puzzle. Lined with gilt-edged shelves converted into cupboards with locks, it possibly served as a muniments room, although the fireplace flanked by fluted pilasters suggests a grander use. The timber fittings have been modified, but are clearly contemporary with the 1740s detail of the adjacent room. When reinstated following conservation, the doors and panelling could be fitted only after the shelves had been replaced, yet one of the shelves is dated 1793. The original dimensions exactly fit the slightly narrower, vaulted room below, suggesting that the fittings have been moved up a floor. The panelled chamber (Fig 6) became a dressing room to the former Oak Bedroom, with a close stool in the window embrasure and six ‘old musquets,’ three pistols and three swords kept here.
More conventional furnishings equipped the principal rooms, with an inventory of 1836 listing mahogany chairs, tables and sideboards, a pianoforte, several games tables, Turkey and Brussels carpets and chintz curtains. By this date, James, the 4th Baronet, had implemented the first of the Victorian additions — a T-shaped block abutting the central stair jamb, containing four grandly scaled rooms over two floors.
The 4th Baronet had inherited Preston-grange from his aunt in 1818, consequently changing his name to Grant-Suttie. He continued to live at Balgone and Prestongrange passed to his son, George, in 1829, on his marriage to Harriet, daughter of the 7th Earl of Wemyss. A moderniser and improver, George commissioned William Henry Playfair to remodel that house and revived the Prestongrange colliery. After Harriet’s death in 1858, he moved back to Balgone and began to invest large sums in the estate.
Fig 7: A second-floor bedroom in the main range, which was fitted out in the 1740s, with an ogival-breasted corner fireplace overmantel in the manner of William Bruce.
Mercifully, much of what he did to the house proved reversible. Instead of sweeping away the Georgian front and interiors, he simply pushed out the central three bays at ground and first-floor level with a balustraded infill between the stair-towers. The new loggia proved too draughty and was converted to an outer hall; above it, the drawing room extension featured three large plate-glass windows that jarred with the existing 12-pane sashes.
On the east front, the spaces between the three wings had been infilled piecemeal with a complex arrangement of service and circulation spaces. The north wing now disappeared behind a huge crowstepped extension, conceived by Playfair as a first-floor dining room over a servants’ parlour and bachelors’ rooms. Playfair died in 1857 and the work was executed a few years later by his principal clerk, James Anderson Hamilton, who also designed two elaborate gate lodges. The grey hammered rubble contrasted harshly with the harled finishes. Nor did the extension stop with the dining room, but, in an odd piece of planning, wrapped round the north-east corner of the old house with a baronial-style stair-tower and encased the north end with a narrow range.
Balgone’s Victorian heyday came to an abrupt end in 1878, when the 6th Baronet died only four months after his father. The 7th Baronet was an absentee invalid with no heir so, after a period of letting, Balgone became home to his uncle and cousins, latterly Hilda and Ethel Grant-Suttie, who lived here without electricity well into the 1960s, housing goats and chickens in some of the rooms.
By the time the Deans bought Balgone from the 8th Baronet, the lead had been stolen, pigeons roosted in the dining-room pendants and dry rot was rampant. Their restoration combined careful research and conservation practice with resourcefulness and creativity. They returned the kitchen to the original tower, where an arched recess with a massive chimney and a spiral staircase rise through the thickness of the east wall (Fig 4). In the process of removing the Victorian wings and stripping off failed harling and internal linings, the Deans uncovered crucial information about the early structure. A defaced bolection moulding emerged on the south stair-tower, revealing the origi-nal main doorway. Other blocked-up openings provided evidence for the lost wing.
It was when they were creating a library in the ante-room off the drawing room that they uncovered Balgone’s most intriguing feature: a huge fireplace with moulded shafts and foliate capitals, bearing a close resemblance to a 15th-century one at Affleck Castle, Angus. Two successive smaller fireplaces had been inserted, but these were removed and the stonework, which was in a precarious state, consolidated. The structure has clearly never been moved, suggesting that this part of the north range is late medieval.
Reusing dismantled materials and rescuing crown glass and parquet flooring from Edinburgh skips, the Deans recaptured Balgone’s 18th-century form and character in a way that feels comfortable and unpretentious. They did much of the decoration themselves and the house is filled with paintings by Mrs Dean, a graduate of theatre design from the Central School, London. On the south side, they created a small walled potager and they replanned the abandoned main garden with hedges and topiary centred around the vista to North Berwick Law.
The impressive restoration of this complex house has thrown up all sorts of intriguing details that pose as many questions as they answer. It has revealed Balgone House to be a fascinating palimpsest that reflects the changing tastes and demands of one family over more than 300 years.
This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
