Four years ago, Donald Fothergill came to Kinross House for the first time. He now likens his first sight of it to an out-of-body experience. The house seemed to reach out and grab him. ‘It had found me,’ he says, with conviction.

In part, that almost visceral response is a tribute to Sir William Bruce, the politician, grandee and architect who built Kinross for himself and brilliantly controlled his visitors’ approach to his house. Merely to find the gates provides a moment of drama: they lie at the end of a modest side street in the town of Kinross, 25 miles north of Edinburgh. They are handsome enough, having been built as part of a campaign to revive Kinross at the beginning of the 20th century, but, as they swing open, you see that a more enticing object in the distance, in the shape of a neat, unadorned mansion of the late 17th century, topped by a hipped roof and cupola.

As yet, it is far off there is an avenue to go down before reaching it, ‘the noblest you could imagine,’ as Daniel Defoe described it in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6). To appreciate Bruce’s orchestration of your arrival, it would be better to walk or ride down the avenue, or, preferably, be swept along it in a carriage. But even by car, the visitor finds his sense of excitement and anticipation mounting, as he approaches the end of the trees; for here is a circle of grass (originally gravel), big enough for a cricket pitch, as can be seen from the wooden pavilion on the right. Care has to be taken in proceeding along the drive to avoid the oystercatcher who has made a nest on the gravel.

You can now see the house clearly. Unlike many Scottish houses, the natural austerity of which is enhanced by the use of grey limestone or granite, Kinross is built of sandstone, grey but strongly marked with streaks of orange. Screens that incorporate ogee-roofed pavilions the house has no wings sweep out to enfold the visitor; the curve is alternately concave and convex. Kinross is, in some ways, a restrained house, remarkable for its early use of sash windows, although these are set in large areas of wall.

The roof has no dormers, as it would do in an English house of this date. Clearly, Bruce had thought carefully about the way to simplify the design as far as possible, as the attic windows are inserted, quirkily, in a line between cornice and eaves. But, on approaching the front door, you find that the house is not without ornament: garlands of flowers are quarried out of the wall surface as if they are bubbling up from inside the stone.

The present owner, Mr Fothergill, had only come to look at the property on a whim, while being driven south from one of many frustrating and unsuccessful attempts to buy a shooting estate in the Highlands. He had, at that point, not thought of buying it, but events moved quickly. ‘Forty-five minutes before reaching the gates, I’d been asleep,’ he remembers. ‘An hour after arriving, I had shaken hands with the owners on the sale.’

The owner of engineering and IT businesses in Middlesborough, Mr Fothergill is a man who knows his own mind. He does not do things by halves, nor does he do them slowly. Since his purchase of Kinross, he has, effectively, taken the house to pieces and reassembled it, using a team of craftsmen from Scottish firms. It now has a sound roof, solid floor joists and efficient services, which can be run from a tablet anywhere in the world. Vaulted basement rooms that had previously been used to store an accumulation of family possessions have been turned into living spaces. As thorough as it is possible to imagine, the restoration was completed in the almost unbelievably short time of 15 months.

The architecture of the place has been scrupulously respected. Of course, it has been. Mr Fothergill feels the weight of destiny on his shoulder and perhaps the hand of Bruce, whose portrait from 1664 hangs on the staircase hall. It shows a man of refinement, with a drawing implement in his right hand, presumably about to add a few strokes to the paper that he holds in his left. His was a remarkable career (Country Life, October 14, 2009). This debonair individual played a key role in the Restoration of Charles II. As chaos descended after Cromwell’s death in 1658, he appears to have persuaded Gen Monck to support the return of the Stuarts and then to have acted as intermediary with the exiled Court.

With the Restoration, Bruce’s star soared. The second son of a Perthshire laird, his early years had been so unremarkable that almost nothing is known about them, but, under Charles II, he became a baronet, a Privy Councillor of Scotland, a collector of fines and taxes and the surveyor of the King’s works in Scotland. By 1665, he could buy the Balcaskie estate; the Kinross estate was bought from the nearly bankrupt Earl of Morton 10 years later. He soon began to lay out the garden.

The progress of the house he started in 1685 can be followed through a detailed set of accounts, recorded in Hubert Fenwick’s Architect Royal (1970). By this time, Bruce may have felt that a peerage was overdue, but his star crashed to earth as quickly as it had risen. Owing everything to the Stuarts, he became persona non grata after the abdication of James II. Kinross was never fully completed.

His son John struggled to maintain the house and gardens at Kinross and they quarrelled; the relationship was not improved when Bruce, a widower, remarried. If a memorial was raised after Bruce’s death in 1710, nothing is known about it.

Kinross House could, however, be said to be Bruce’s monument. It must have astounded contemporaries. Nothing so self-assured, controlled by a giant Corinthian order, but magnificently restrained in its economy of detail, had been built in Scotland, or indeed England, before (Country Life, March 25 and April 1, 1965). It could hardly have been predicted from Bruce’s own earlier works. Kinross shows a far more sophisticated understanding of Classicism than his quadrangle at Holyroodhouse, built a few years earlier. Thirlestane, which he remodelled for the effective ruler of Scotland, the Duke of Lauderdale, suggests a romantic eye for castle architecture.

In this, Bruce anticipated Vanbrugh. And, although the origins of the Picturesque Movement are conventionally ascribed to Vanbrugh’s letter of 1709 to the Duchess of Marlborough about the restoration of the ruined Woodstock Manor, as an incident to stir reflection in a landscape, Bruce had already made a ruin Loch Leven Castle a key element of his conception at Kinross 30 years earlier.

Loch Leven Castle, on an island in the middle of Loch Leven, was a Stuart icon. Mary, Queen of Scots had been brutally imprisoned there, until in one of those glittering, romantic episodes that happened so often in the lives of the Stuarts she charmed one of her gaolers into allowing her to escape. An axis runs from the entrance gates at Kinross, through the centre of the house and out through the garden gate, aligned on the castle. Bruce contrived that his house should lie at the exact midpoint between gates and castle.

Bruce not only appropriated Loch Leven Castle as part of his view, but also, perhaps, hoped that its legend would become part of his own family story. Another strand of mental activity is indicated by the many sundials in the gardens: Bruce was evidently fascinated by the contemporary preoccupation with dialling, associated with the great question of a method of calculating longitude. We can now appreciate Bruce’s idea for the setting, as well as the architecture of the house, as the garden has been reinstated according to the 17th-century plan, but using modern plants.

Bruce’s family kept the house until 1777, when it was bought by an East India Company trader called George Graham. He left the estate to his illegitimate son, James, on condition that he marry his cousin, the daughter of George’s brother, Thomas Graham, who, failing this marriage, succeeded to Kinross. As his own son had been killed by pirates, Thomas made it a condition of his will that Kinross would be inherited by whichever of his daughters produced a son first. It went to the youngest, Helen, and her husband Sir James Montgomery. At that time, however, the Montgomerys lived at Stobo, now a spa hotel, and so, from 1819, Kinross House was shut up.

The Victorians, therefore, made no alterations. By the time Kinross came out of mothballs in 1902, architects such as Lorimer appreciated the Scottish tradition. In his restoration, Sir Basil Montgomery employed the scholarly Dr Thomas Ross.

By 2011, another century had passed and it was time for another campaign of work, into which Mr Fothergill threw himself with gusto. Happily, he was able to buy several key pieces of furniture from Mr and Mrs James Montgomery, who had previously lived here. From them came not only the portrait of Bruce, but also many pieces of 18th-century and Regency furniture, each of which has been given new life by Scottish restorers.

From the same source come family pictures to complement the overdoors and overmantels, presumably collected by Bruce while travelling. The new look is immediately apparent from the entrance hall, where the walls have been painted with light yellow, picked out with a subtly darker shade, with the screens of coupled Corinthian columns in white. The floor, dark with the boots of ages, has been cleaned to reveal the same stone as the exterior of the house, its pronounced veining laid so as to suggest patterns.

The dining room, previously in use as a kitchen, has been returned to its original purpose, with a ceiling celebrating the different owners of the house painted by Graham Rust. An even more striking achievement awaits visitors who ascend the oak staircase: the saloon on the piano nobile has not merely been redecor-ated by Mr Fothergill, but finished by him.

Bruce’s work stopped in the Saloon, where the doorcases and fireplaces were left incomplete. Mr Fothergill succeeded in convincing Historic Scotland that he should add them which pedants might regard as a controversial alteration to a Grade A-listed building. The triumph is now there to see. The room has, for the first time, acquired the proportions that Bruce intended for it. (Or almost: the coved ceiling is an insertion of 1902. The original form of Bruce’s ceiling is unknown, but it was higher.)

Having answered the call of Kinross House, Mr Fothergill could not complete his task until he had found a use for it, enabling the building to be a commercial success and thereby ensuring its long-term future. This he did by making it available throughout the year, fully staffed as a luxury exclusive-use property (www.kinrosshouse.com). Mr Fothergill continues to live in Yorkshire, visiting the property every few weeks. People who ask whether he intends to rescue other country houses observe a palpable twinkle in his eye. He is, perhaps, just awaiting the right property to call to him.

This article was first published in Country Life on August 6 2014.

Visitors to Bourton House garden are often amazed at the array of pots and containers that they see around the garden. The main display is arranged around the glasshouse and potting-shed area and takes in a large, wooden, raised bed which had, at one time, been used for alpines, although perhaps not very successfully.

The present potwork displays happen each year rather by accident than design. We grow a lot of half-hardy plants, those that are tender to frost, which are used through the summer season in the main borders of the garden. They range from simple marguerites to spiky and exotic looking Aeoniums and Agaves, with a whole range of other things in between. We always propagate and grow on more than our borders need (largely as an insurance policy against the vagaries of the weather), hence the potted displays could be said to be, to some extent, created from the ‘leftovers’.

But perhaps that’s doing them an injustice, as the ‘leftovers’, when planted into their own pots and stood beside others of their kind, have an importance and presence in their own right. Nevertheless, because the plants are growing in containers of various sorts, their needs are greater than those that are growing in the borders. There are, therefore, some major considerations we factor in to achieve successful displays and the following approach has served us well at Bourton House for many years.

We use soil-based (John Innes-type) composts, as they readily re-wet if they should become dry; they’re often mixed with other, soil-less brands to improve or leaven the texture. As the plants have to stand from the beginning of June until the end of October, they need to be able to grow on without becoming pot-bound too early in the season (although they will be by the end of it). Therefore, they’re potted on periodically, into clay pots as much as possible, particularly for the subjects that will be seen at the front of the display. However, clays dry out much more quickly than their plastic counterparts, which leads me on to the key subject of watering.

After potting on, the plants are watered thoroughly immediately, then, subsequently, only when they need it, although care needs to be taken not to overwater succulents, whose water requirements are very limited. And, of course, it’s wrong to assume that, during a rainy spell, the pots won’t need watering, as foliage can shrug off water away from the compost and the contents remain dry.

Potted displays also require feeding as the original compost only contains sufficient nutrients for the initial few weeks, so we top-dress with a pelleted, slow-release fertiliser that will continue to feed out nutrients until the end of the season. Last, but not least, is the exciting part, the displaying of the plants.

We don’t have a plan, but we do know the effect we want to achieve. When placing the plants, we mix the tender species such as Abutilon and Tibouchina—with the succulents, paying attention to shape, form, texture and heights, moving them around until we get a pleasing result. Most of them are placed very close together so that, very quickly, the actual pots won’t be seen beneath the wealth of flowers and foliage.

Bourton House Garden, Bourton-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire (01386 700754; www.bourtonhouse.com). The garden is open April (but not Easter) to October, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 10am–5pm.

* This article was first published in Country Life magazine on July 23 2014

These images are the from the Country Life Picture Library and link it to www.countrylifeimages.co.uk.

In 1916, in the village of Snowshill in the north Cotswolds, an astute London entrepreneur with a passion for building and a gifted Birmingham architect came together to create an important Arts-and-Crafts house. The entrepreneur, Sydney Bolton Russell (1866–1938), had an innate talent for spotting the potential of disregarded Cotswold buildings.

In the early 1900s, he was a manager for the Midlands brewer Samuel Allsopp and Sons and travelled the country inspecting its public houses. On one of his trips, he came upon the Lygon Arms in Broadway. Although the village was liberally endowed with inns, many of them interesting historic buildings, he shrewdly recognised that the Lygon Arms stood apart due to its impressive size and imposing 16th-century frontage with four towering gables. This, he realised, had the potential to be more than just an inn relying on bar trade from locals.

Ambitious and confident of his abilities and business acumen, Russell obtained financial backing, bought the building from the Allsopps and, in 1903, found himself owner of the property. Adopting the Cotswold country house of the Tudor and Stuart period as his model, he transformed the inn into a hotel of international repute. He recounted his happy and eventful experiences in his book The Story of an Old English Hostelry (1914), but, by 1915, he felt the need to move out of the hotel and seek a comfortable house nearby to sepa-rate his business and family life.

In the village of Snowshill, two miles to the south of Broadway, he found a derelict yeoman farmer’s house of about 1600 that had been split into three cottages and then abandoned. They stood on a sloping site at the eastern edge of the village commanding fine views over the Cotswolds and the Vale of Evesham. The surrounding pasture had long been known as Tower Close and this was, presumably, the inspiration for the striking new tower that was to form the centrepiece of his future home.

Russell purchased the ruin from the Snowshill Manor estate when it was offered for sale by auction in June 1916. He then turned to the architect who had renovated the Lygon Arms for him, Charles Edward Bateman (1863–1947). Bateman had trained with Verity and Hunt in their office in Evesham on the northern edge of the Cotswolds. There, he was involved in altering and extending a number of old Cotswold houses. During his travels, he sketched prolifically and grew to appreciate and value the traditional stone architecture of the district.

He was to carry out a number of important commissions in the region, including the renovation of Asthall Manor near Burford for Lord Redesdale, the rebuilding of a substantial house called West End in Broadway and the conversion of four cottages in Snowshill into a single rambling house called Green Close.

The property Russell had bought comprised three structures on a T-shaped plan. Forming the top bar of the T was a two-storey, south-facing range with an attic floor and a low extension from it on the same alignment. Projecting northwards from this at right angles was a wing. Due to the steep fall of the site, this last building was at a lower level than the main house.

The architect’s brief was to create a substantial family home for Russell, his wife and their three sons from this idiosyncratic ensemble. Bateman drew upon his knowledge and understanding of Cotswold vernacular buildings in the ensuing conversion.

The main block of the house was renovated and new dormer windows with hipped roofs inserted in the relaid stone-slate roofs. In addition, the low extension was demolished and replaced by a new two-storey structure, with a kitchen and scullery on the ground floor and a dressing room and maid’s bedroom above. To serve the kitchen, a robust square stone chimneystack was built within the centre of the extension. Finally, the north wing was renovated as a hall-like living room, with an open timber roof. Its north gable was filled by a broad four-light mullion and transom window.

Set in the walls of this room are some fragments of medieval sculpture, including a section of what is probably an early-14th-century tomb slab carved with a man’s head. Opening off the side of this fine room is a delightful alcove large enough to accommodate armchairs and warmed by a large fire. This is, in fact, the basement level of the new three-storey tower that Bateman created within the inside angle of the T-shaped plan of the house.

The external design of this boldly conceived feature—with gables on each face with stone tabling and decorative roundels (one of them initialled ‘SRE’ for Sydney and Elizabeth Russell and dated 1916)—was inspired by the 17th-century square tower at Daneway House at Sapperton in Gloucestershire. In his published writings, Bateman wrote of his admiration of the house, which he would have known as the showroom of his fellow architects Ernest Gimson and Ernest Barnsley.

The tower windows overlooking the garden are designed as slits to accentuate the height of the building and the small upper level is treated as an intimate study lit on each side by two-light leaded windows. This enjoys wonderful far-reaching views of the Cotswold countryside and the intersecting timbers of its roof create the illusion of an enclosing four-part vault.

Bateman orchestrated his garden elevation with great skill, marshalling the diverse elements of the broad gable end of the living room and the lofty tower into a coherent and visually satisfying ensemble. Adding further interest to this front is a garden wall that links the new tower to an acutely angled outbuilding with a pyramidal roof. As a whole, the building nestles delightfully into the hillside of the village.

Internally, all Bateman’s skills and sensitivity were revealed. He chose to retain the staircase in the centre of the house and this dictated the layout of a study and dining room either side of the staircase on the ground floor and a bedroom each side of the staircase on the upper floors. The main historic elements of the house were retained and carefully restored. A number of the internal walls with timber studding and panels of plaster were preserved.

He and the Russell family, however, collaboratively also made an import-ant contribution to the building. As at the Lygon Arms, Russell furnished the interiors with his favourite Jacobean furniture, which complemented the rooms perfectly. His son, Gordon (1892–1980), the future celebrated furniture designer, was sent copies of the architect’s drawings of the renovation and extension of Tower Close while serving as a soldier in France.

Having made his own study of the architecture of the Cotswolds with a series of sketches, he wrote home commenting knowledgably on the proposals. He designed new oak wall-panelling for the dining room following 17th-century precedents. In addition, he created panelling and glazed cabinets in English cedar for the study. These originally housed his father’s splendid collection of old English drinking glasses.

Throughout the house, the room and cupboards doors are made with wide oak boards and decorated with wrought-iron strap hinges and latches in the Arts-and-Crafts tradition. There is also delightfully modelled plasterwork with motifs of leaves, flowers and birds drawn from Nature.

Above the principal bedroom fireplace, for example, is a fine decorative panel with the letters S for Sydney and E for his wife Elizabeth and the date 1920. A flight of swallows races playfully across the underside of the stairs. All the decorative plasterwork in the house was modelled by F. E. Osborne, a skilled craftsman working in the same tradition as Ernest Gimson and George Bankart.

Tower Close at Snowshill was Bateman’s Cotswold masterpiece and it is appropriate therefore that the newly completed building was rec-orded in Country Life (June 9, 1928). It is today particularly fortunate in its owners, who purchased the property in 2012. Jamie and Claire Wright had been looking for a Cotswold house for some time, but stumbled across the sales particulars of Tower Close in the window of a Broadway estate agent while on holiday from Canada. They first visited it on their 40th wedding anniversary and this happy coincidence cemented the affection they immediately felt for it.

The Wrights have come to enjoy the quality of Bateman’s creation. Among their most important changes to the house has been the removal of a floor inserted into the volume of the hall in the north wing. This interior space has now been opened up again as originally intended. Through their work to this room, as well as through their sensitive furnishing of the house as a whole, it is still possible to appreciate here Bateman at his best.

This article was first published in Country Life magazine on July 16 2014