Mackintosh House Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland.

Getty Images

Mackintosh House

Top choice in Glasgow


Attached to the Hunterian Art Gallery, this is a reconstruction of the first home that Charles Rennie Mackintosh bought with his wife, noted designer/artist Margaret Macdonald. It's fair to say that interior decoration was one of their strong points; Mackintosh House is startling even today. The quiet elegance of the hall and dining room on the ground floor give way to a stunning drawing room and bedroom upstairs. Visits are by guided tour in the morning and self guided in the afternoon.

The visual highlight is the white-as-white drawing room. There's something otherworldly about the very mannered style of the beaten silver panels, the long-backed chairs and the surface decorations echoing Celtic manuscript illuminations. You wouldn't have wanted to be the guest who spilled a glass of red on this carpet.

The house will perhaps become part of the new museum at Kelvin Hall, but likely not until at least 2023.


Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Nearby Glasgow attractions

1. Hunterian Art Gallery

0.02 MILES

Across the road from the Hunterian Museum, and part of the same bequest, this art gallery incorporates Mackintosh House as well as a good selection of…

2. Hunterian Museum

0.09 MILES

Housed in the glorious sandstone university building, which is in itself reason enough to pay a visit, this quirky museum contains the collection of…

3. University of Glasgow

0.12 MILES

Though founded in 1451, the city's first university has only been located here in the West End since the 1870s. Its imposing sandstone neo-Gothic main…

4. Kelvingrove Park

0.29 MILES

On both banks of the meandering River Kelvin, a tributary of the Clyde, this West End park is popular with dog walkers, foot commuters and canoodling…

5. Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum

0.31 MILES

A magnificent sandstone building, this grand Victorian cathedral of culture is a fascinating and unusual museum, with a bewildering variety of exhibits…

6. Kelvin Hall

0.33 MILES

Opened in the 1920s as an exhibition centre, this enormous sandstone palace, renovated and reopened in 2016, is a mixed leisure-and-arts space. In…

7. Botanic Gardens

0.39 MILES

A marvellous thing about walking in here is the way the noise of Great Western Rd suddenly recedes into the background. The wooded gardens follow the…

8. National Library of Scotland

0.41 MILES

In Kelvin Hall, this outpost of Edinburgh's National Library of Scotland hosts a small exhibition and a digital archive of maps and audiovisual material…

  • placement: superzone
  • path: Destinations/POIs/superzone
  • possible size: [970, 250], [970, 90], [728, 90], [1, 1],
  • targeting:
    {
      "url": "scotland/glasgow/west-end-1342325/attractions/mackintosh-house/a/poi-sig/409896/1342325",
      "destination": "Glasgow",
      "continent": "Europe",
      "country": "Scotland",
      "city": "Glasgow",
      "position": "superzone"
    }