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This was the last castle to be designed by Robert Adam. The designs comprised a house with flanking links terminating in service ranges, with a courtyard range opposite for stables. The main house followed Adam’s traditional villa plan comprising three principal rooms arranged around a central staircase, with bedchambers and rooms in the storeys above and staff rooms in the basement.
Robert Adam died in March, 1792 and elements of the design were altered during construction. The house was built with an additional third floor and the flanking links were built with hipped roofs. Elements of Adam's designs were omitted including the proposed basement, conical pepper-pot roofs to the turrets on the west elevation, and some of the crenelations. The courtyard range appears to have been constructed to Adam’s designs, although it has been subject to greater modifications, in particular with the infilling of the screen wall. The later modifications and interior of the house have been attributed to the architect William Elliot (1761-c.1835). A porte-cochere and porch were added to the east and west fronts of the house respectively in the early-nineteenth century and a canted bay window was added to the north front in the mid-nineteenth century.
Literature: A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index, pp. 29, 70; A. Rowan, ‘Robert Adam’s Last Castles’, Country Life, Vol. 156, 22 August 1974, pp. 494-497; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume 1, pp. 156, 175-6, 355; C. Mosley (ed.), Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, 2003, p. 1304; K. Cruft, J. Dunbar and R. Fawcett, The Buildings of Scotland: Borders, 2006, pp. 705-6
Louisa Catt, 2023
Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.
Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).
Contents of Stobs Castle, Borders: designs for a castle-style building for Sir William Eliott 6th Baronet of Stobs, 1792, as executed (7)
- [1] Design for a castle-style building, 1792, executed to a variant design
- [2] Design for a castle-style building, 1792, executed to a variant design
- [3] Design for a castle-style building, 1792, executed to a variant design
- [4] Design for a castle-style building, 1792, executed to a variant design
- [5] Design for a castle-style building, 1792, executed to a variant design
- [6] Design for a castle-style building, 1792, executed to a variant design
- [7] Design for a castle-style building, 1792, executed to a variant design