Anniston House once stood around six miles north of Arbroath in Angus, southeast of the village of Inverkeilor. The estate was originally known as Little Inchiach and is shown on William Roy’s Military Survey (1747-1755), but its name was changed to Anniston sometime after being purchased in 1732 by Dr George Rait. The Rait family had been the lairds of Halgreen Castle at Inverbervie, between Montrose and Stonehaven, since the fifteenth century. They had an active presence in the parish of Inverkeilor certainly by the seventeenth century when a Rev. James Rait was the Episcopalian minister of Inverkeilor until being deposed in 1688. By the early-eighteenth century, the main line of the family was in financial trouble and in 1724 Halgreen Castle and its estates were sold to the Coutts family after the death of the 11th laird, William, to cover debts.

Dr George Rait, a Dundee physician, was William’s younger brother and succeeded as head of the family, moving the family home to Anniston. The Raits of Anniston followed a variety of military and commercial careers in India throughout the 1800s, remaining in ownership of the estate until the death of Agnes Carnegie (née Rait) in 1932.

It is unclear whether an ‘Anniston House’ existed at Little Inchiach when George Rait purchased the property in 1732. Only a cluster of farm buildings are shown on Roy’s Military Survey and he may have simply invested in the land while remaining resident in Dundee. Certainly, the decision to aggrandise the property into a neoclassical country house was not taken until the time of his grandson, John Rait of Anniston (1748-1823), who inherited the estate as a minor in 1760. John Rait may have been familiar with the Playfair family in Angus and, as an enfranchised landowner, would probably have been aware of proposals for the new County Buildings in Forfar, where James Playfair was appointed as architect in early 1785. Rait was one of several small landowners around Dundee who provided Playfair with early commissions, possibly through the encouragement of the architect’s friend and patron, Robert Graham of Fintry. This was a closely connected network of local gentry, and Playfair’s journal records that he provided drawings for two of Rait’s relations: his cousin, Sir George Ramsey of Ardormie, and his future brother-in-law, James Guthrie of Craigie.

Playfair’s earliest drawings for Anniston are dated 1784 and must have been prepared in advance of his annual journey to Scotland in September to December when he first records visiting Anniston in his journal, charging for ten days in attendance. The final design was agreed with Rait in July 1785, to be executed at an estimated cost of £1,508, and a note on one of Playfair’s office drawings records that construction began later that same month. Over the next three years he made three further visits to Anniston before work finished on site in November 1788. The following year, Playfair reported to Robert Graham of Fintry in May that ‘I have settled all with … Mr Rait’, and he made his final recorded visit, presumably to inspect the completed work, in October 1789. Unfortunately, Playfair’s time spent working on drawings for Anniston is never specified in his journal besides a belated mention of producing a design for a book stand in March 1788, presumably during the final furnishing of the house.

The scheme drawings include several design options for John Rait’s new house, the agreed design, and a selection of working and construction drawings. The elegance of Playfair’s draughtsmanship already shines through in this early scheme, particularly in the presentation drawings. The design as built consisted of an H-plan house with a central three-storey central block flanked by lower wings and symmetrically arranged service courts. This essential arrangement of volumes was later replicated in his designs for Melville Castle (1785) and Langholm Lodge (1786). The Anniston scheme includes several features that would become common to Playfair’s neoclassical work: stripped back Doric classical details, shallow-pitched pavilion roofs and pediments, and Venetian windows. Likewise, Playfair’s treatment of the house’s subsidiary wings and service rooms already reflects his interest in rational planning and the desire to dignify these spaces as part of a grand overall design. At Anniston, rows of Doric pilasters extend to either side of the main house, giving the impression of colonnaded Palladian walkways, while in fact screening a range of kitchen offices to the east and housing a glazed green-house-cum-billiard room to the west. Playfair’s oeuvre reveals a wider interest in green-houses and hot-houses, but elsewhere always as ornamental garden buildings or within walled gardens; Anniston appears to be the only place where he proposed a green-house incorporated into the country house itself.

On the other hand, there are other elements which suggest Playfair’s lack of formal training in classical design, like the off-centre front door on the north elevation and the arrangement of an even rather than odd number of bays on the south elevation. Elsewhere these might perhaps be explained in part by the need to incorporate an existing building into the new house, but there is no evidence that this was the case at Anniston.

A view of Anniston House published in Forfarshire Illustrated (1843), correlates with the design agreed between Playfair and Rait in July 1785. To the southeast of the house was an enclosed terraced garden overlooking wider parkland. From the evidence of the 1st ed. Ordnance Survey (1859-61), a walled garden was laid out to the north of the house, the office courtyard to the southwest, and there was a pair of lodges at the end of the west drive. These elements of the estate were probably developed at the same time as the house, and while Playfair’s involvement is neither confirmed by his journal nor the drawing record, the surviving but much-altered office court retains enough of its neoclassical character to suggest it is also from Playfair’s hand.

During the nineteenth century, the simplicity of Playfair’s neoclassical design for Anniston was eroded by the addition of a full-height bow window and a veranda to the garden front and the alteration of the side wings with an extra storey and canted bays. Having passed out of the Rait family in 1932, Anniston House was demolished in 1935 following the sale of the contents at auction.

Rory Lamb, 2025

Literature:
National Library of Scotland Adv.Ms/33/525 – James Playfair’s Journal of Architecture, 1783-1791; National Records of Scotland, GD151/11/32 – Letters from James Playfair to Robert Graham of Fintry, 1785-1791; Forfarshire Illustrated: Being Views of the Gentlemen’s Seats, Antiquities, and Scenery in Forfarshire (Dundee: Gershom Cumming), 1843, 71-72; The Raitt Stuff, “The Raits of Anniston House”: https://www.raitt.org/anniston-raits.html [accessed 30/05/2025]

Scheme

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