William Burn, Architect (1789 – 1870)

This office has a long held interest and connection with the Scottish architect William Burn, stemming from Paul’s PhD thesis which looked at his extraordinarily prolific practice. It has been a pleasure to have worked on several country houses and castles he designed.

Born in Edinburgh in 1789, William Burn was to become one of the most prolific and sought-after country house architects of the nineteenth century. His output, which was predominantly domestic, was aesthetically diverse, and at the leading edge of architectural taste: there are over 300 of his houses in Scotland, England and Ireland.

Burn had, as we try to emulate, a meticulous understanding of how his clients lived and ordered their lives. He would arrange their living spaces with unparalleled precision, and confidently craft their elevations to create masterly compositions: many of his completed works represent some of the most instructive and original country houses of the nineteenth century.

The importance of Burn to this office is that he saw no need to limit his output to a single style. His training was as a Classical architect and his early designs were formed through an adherence to proportion and prescribed by symmetry. But his later work took this base, applied detailing and features, and created interesting, carefully considered asymmetric designs. Consequently many of his country houses combine Classical discipline and proportion with controlled freedom and increasing compositional complexity.

Mastering the various fashions and prevailing tastes of the nineteenth century Burn was able to design, detail and adapt with quality and precision any site or existing structure his clients brought to him. In his hands it “made no difference” whether they envisaged a house in  Greek Revival, neo-Jacobean, Scots Baronial, Tudor Gothic, Castlellated or Italianate style. Burn, and his scholarly office team, had an elegant mastery of them all.

In 2002, working with legendary James Hunter Blair, owner of Burn’s magnificent Blairquhan Castle (Ayrshire), a permanent exhibition room dedicated to the life and work of William Burn was established within the castle. in the years since completing his Doctoral research, Paul has lectured widely about Burn and a monograph in in preparation.

This office is very proud of its links with Burn and the spirit with which he built so well, and we are pleased to be regularly approached by owners of buildings designed by Burn, his business partner David Bryce (1803-1876), and also by Burn’s architect nephew John MacVicar Anderson (1835-1915) and have advised on repair, refurbishment and proposals for the alteration of numerous of these country houses and estate buildings.