Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Champfleurie House, West Lothian: designs for a house for Alexander Johnston, 1790, executed status unknown (6)

Browse

Purpose

Champfleurie House, West Lothian: designs for a house for Alexander Johnston, 1790, executed status unknown (6)

Notes

There is very little known about Alexander Johnston (d.1793), of Straiton. He owned the Straiton estate, as well as the Champfleurie estate and died a bachelor in 1793, leaving both estates to his brother James Johnston. The estate was eventually inherited by Admiral Robert Johnston Stewart of Physgill and Glasserton who built a new house at Champfleurie in 1851, the designs of which have been attributed to the architect David Rhind.

Historic maps show that there was a pre-existing property at Champfleurie. The Adam office made designs for a new villa at Champfleurie in 1790. It is not clear if this house was executed or not. Early-nineteenth century maps do show a property on the site but this could relate to an earlier property. Interestingly, in 1792 the gardens were laid out by landscape architect Thomas White. The existing house, dating from 1851, does not show any resemblance to the Adam office scheme and is presumed to be an entirely new property which would suggest either the Adam designs were not executed or were demolished soon after.

Literature: Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review, Volume 63, Part 2, 1793, p. 677; A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, p.6; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 2, 2001, pp. 122; Historic Environment Scotland, ‘Champfleurie House with lodge, gate piers and boundary wall’, online [accessed 26 October 2023]

Louisa Catt, 2023

Level

Scheme

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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 Champfleurie House, West Lothian: designs for a house for Alexander Johnston, 1790, executed status unknown (6)