Who lives in a house like this? Well, artist Frank Convery and his family have for the past 10 years. And now, having breathed new life into this amazing building, they are giving another family the chance to live in the one-off home.
It’s hard to imagine, if you lived in a home as mind-blowingly impressive as this one, that you would ever really get used to it.
But having bought Stracathro Mansion in Brechin more than 10 years ago, Frank Convery admits that you can become a little complacent.
“It’s when visitors come over and they are pretty much silent mostly, you wonder if everything is OK. But mostly the response is that they don’t know what to say, they are just taking it all in,” Frank explained.
“And that often is the time that you remind yourself that it is quite a privilege to have a space like this.
“The children would obviously have their friends up and they were pretty freaked out by it, so it was a reminder to them as well that they have this great space.”
Frank and his family – including kids Eve, Blythe and Mirin – moved to this Angus mansion in 2003 from a six-bedroom house in Laurencekirk.
While they were looking for extra space for themselves, Frank was also looking for space for his paintings as well.
Frank, who has lived in Aberdeenshire since the late 80s and previously worked as the head of painting at Gray’s School of Art, explained: “Well, being an artist, it’s quite a selfish business and you want a house that accommodates all the rubbish that you make and, obviously, this was a gift in this way.
“A lot of the pictures I make are very large and they often come back from exhibitions because they are not sold and they go into garages and they don’t get seen again for years.
“So getting a house that allows you to hang the pictures and rotate them is always something painters are keen to have. So clearly Stracathro and the scale of it offered me that option.
“I have three kids and they were relatively young at that time so the space was great for them, but clearly we weren’t going to fill the house in terms of the family, it was just so everyone had their own space and for me to get studio and gallery spaces.”
Frank came across the unusual estate in a small advert in a newspaper and decided to inquire about it.
But he said it was in quite a “relaxed way” as he didn’t think he’d get it and as they already had a big house, they weren’t in a desperate need of it.
The house was owned at the time by NHS Tayside, having been used as a residence for doctors and nurses.
The Strathcathro Estate, which extended to almost 2,000 acres, was bought by Patrick Cruikshank, who made his fortune in Jamaica in 1775. His brother Alexander inherited the property and employed Aberdeen-based architect Archibald Simpson to build the house between 1824-27. It was later bought by Sir James Campbell, Lord Provost of Glasgow and father of prime minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
Frank explained that when he first went to see the house, it was “fantastic” and had been maintained and cared for but not upgraded or refurbished.
“It was all looking a bit shabby, as you can imagine, and that’s where I could see a refurbishment would transform it,” he said.
“That appealed to me, that was something that I could do as a project.
“Any house I’ve ever had has had some kind of refurbishment. Houses can have great potential and I would like to think that I had helped them realise that potential.”
But Frank admits that he didn’t have to do much to make this fantastic home reach its potential – as its original design was already perfect.
“We had plans for the house and found that bathrooms were not where they should be, and boarded-up areas which we just simply opened up to its original plan,” he said.
“So they were very superficial moves, such as plaster-boards being removed to uncover doorways. At the time, we didn’t know the extent of a difference it would make. But subsequently we could see it’s made a great difference.
“The original design was really not needed to be tampered with, it was well designed.”