Cairness House

Cairness House, 4 miles (6.4 km) south of Fraserburgh in the County of Aberdeenshire, is a country house in Buchan built in the Neoclassical style. It was constructed between 1791 and 1797 to designs by architect James Playfair and replaced an earlier house of 1781 by Robert Burn, which was in part incorporated into the Playfair scheme. Sir John Soane assisted in the final stages of the construction following Playfair’s death in 1794. The park was laid out by Thomas White, a follower of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown.

The Pevsner Architectural Guide for Aberdeenshire North and Moray states that "Cairness House, by James Playfair 1791-97, is of international importance as the only house in Britain the design and construction of which reflected and evolved with the rapid advances in French Neoclassicism towards the end of the C18" and that "its survival is the more precious as so many of Playfair's other designs were either not built or have been lost or altered".

Cairness House was commissioned by Charles Gordon of Cairness and Buthlaw, a descendant of the Barclays of Cairness through his mother. The House was part of a 9,000-acre (3,600 ha) estate that included the village of St. Comb’s and the Loch of Strathbeg. The second laird, Major-General Thomas Gordon (1788–1841), a good friend of Lord Byron, was a hero of the Greek War of Independence and wrote a celebrated history of the conflict. The Gordon family sold the estate in 1937 to the Countess of Southesk.

After the Second World War, the house was used as a farmhouse and gradually fell into serious decline. The park was destroyed from the early 1950s onwards with the mass clearance of trees in order to reclaim land for agricultural use. In 1991, the house was listed as a Building At Risk by the Scottish Civic Trust. A major long-term restoration programme of the house and grounds was instigated by new owners in 2001.

...
Wikipedia