Kingston House


(Craigend Park, Kingston Clinic)

Kingston House
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Kingston House

A substantial and remarkably ornate house on Kingston Avenue, 2¾ miles (4.5 km) south southeast of the centre of Edinburgh, Kingston House offers fine views north over the city. Built as Craigend Park between 1867-69 for a wealthy manufacturing tailor William Christie, on a 4 ha / 10 acre site on the southern margin of the Inch House estate that had been carefully selected after an extensive search by Christie for its exceptional sunshine. The work of English-born architect Frederick Thomas Pilkington (1832-98), this house is unique, built in a Victorian Romantic Gothic architectural style that has been described as "somewhere between Neo-Italianate and Scottish Baronial". Christie made his fortune making and selling gloves and breeches, and spent the enormous sum of £70,000 on his house. He gave Pilkington a free hand and encouraged the use the best craftsmen to create something exceptional.

The house is built using buff-coloured Craigleith sandstone, featuring prominent bay windows that take advantage of the views, carved friezes, gargoyles and crosses at the apex of the gables, Peterhead granite pillars supporting the porch at its corner entrance, a round tower with a steeply-sloping grey-slated conical roof, and roof terraces at several levels.

Inside, the entrance hall has a fine wooden floor, wood panelling, and a pair of marble pillars supporting an archway that leads to a double-sweep imperial staircase, now richly carpeted with carved balusters, all lit by a large cupola. Pilkington brought craftsmen from Italy to fashion the plasterwork on the ceilings, and carved woodwork was included everywhere.

The house and surrounding large garden were acquired by Edinburgh Corporation in 1917, which set about converting it into a hospital for shell-shocked soldiers and sailors, the Scottish National Neurasthenic Hospital, the only hospital of its kind in Scotland. It closed in 1925 and later became a school, before re-opening in 1938 as the Kingston Clinic - a residential centre for nature cures and a training centre known as the Edinburgh School of Natural Therapeutics. The Inch housing scheme was built immediately to the north in the 1950s. The Kingston Clinic closed in 1988.

Now A-listed, Kingston House was divided into seven luxury flats by York-based Persimmon Homes in 2001, which built new houses in its immediate surroundings.


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