Whether the property is actually a horror or a work of art is dependent on your liking for high Victorian architecture. The house is undeniably unique — one of very few 19th-century residential granite buildings in Aberdeen to have acquired a Historic Scotland category A-listing, normally preserved for stately homes, castles and grandiose municipal institutions.
But its appearance on the market is also a testament to the increasing interest in putting back together houses that have been split into offices or flats.
The owner of the main part of Rubislaw House, already divided into two flats, and the owner of what was the servants’ annexe have got together to put both properties on the market. It is now being sold as a single dwelling, and at £1.3m it is the most expensive house ever to be put on the market in Aberdeen.
The buyer — and those interested are queuing up — will be getting the full Aberdeen monty: granite gothicism with stained glass, pitch-pine linings, baronial ceilings, gargoyles and plaster moulding. Plus an original Victorian water closet.
The lavish, gothic-style building dates from 1887 and is the former home of the city’s master mason, John Morgan — it is in Queen’s Road, Aberdeen’s residential avenue westward to Deeside. Over the years it has acquired architectural celebrity status, not so much for its evident statement of Victorian prosperity but for its splendid eccentricity in an age we today think of as conventionally straight-laced.
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The city is not short on turreted Victoriana, but Rubislaw House has become a minor landmark, a tribute to the granite mason’s craft on a rather more human scale than the immense Marischal College, which Morgan also worked on. (Marischal is reputed to be the second largest granite building in the world after San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Spain, information useful only to aficionados of Trivial Pursuit).
The building was converted into three flats 50 years ago and it is hard to tell what the original layout was in 1887. The plans have disappeared, possibly victim of the Victorian architects’ habit of using old plans drawn on linen as handkerchiefs.
The ground-floor one-bedroom flat has been partitioned, blocking off the spectacularly carved main staircase. A modern kitchen has been installed. But two ground-floor rooms, possibly study or morning rooms, survive in their original form, with ornate plasterwork, the walls shot through with medieval-style arrow slits glazed in stained glass.
The pattern is repeated on the first floor, which includes the ornate drawing room and turreted day room. The top floor, which formed part of the upper flat, has three bedrooms. The stairwell reveals romantic stained glass interpretations of Faith, Hope and Charity and the seven muses. The servants’ annexe, now blocked off from the main house, is suitably plain for its original purpose.
The exterior currently promises rather more than the interior reveals. Without the original plans, Historic Scotland, as guardian of category-A buildings, is likely to allow a certain amount of latitude if and when it comes to reinstating the whole.
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Grants may be available to the new owner for restoration, but the condition of these grants is that the property must be opened to the public for a stipulated number of days each year. But then the house was built to be shown off.
There is reputed to be a secret passage — the house was built on the site of a demolished 16th-century house — to leafy Rubislaw Den, the smart private garden in Aberdeen’s west end, which if discovered should keep several sets of lawyers fully employed on the question of access for years to come.
Today, Rubislaw House, which once stood grandly alone, is hemmed in on either side by lesser but still fine granite buildings. The rear garden runs to about one third of an acre.
The present owner of the main house, who runs clubs and pubs in Aberdeen, makes much of the fact Rubislaw House is a work of art and should be put back to its original state.
As a private house, for all its external bulk, it would make a manageable family home. It would of course also make several suites of equally manageable offices, which is the alternative.
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So is it worth £1.3m even as a whole? You pays your money and takes your choice.
For less money a large house builder will build you a new five-bedroom home, albeit a mish-mash of Tudor, Scottish baronial and Mediterranean. But where’s the fun in that?
Burnett & Co, Aberdeen, 01224 648 797