The Willow Tearooms are tearooms at 217 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, Scotland, designed by internationally renowned architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, which opened for business in October 1903. They quickly gained enormous popularity, and are the most famous of the many Glasgow tearooms that opened in the late 19th and early 20th century. The building was fully restored, largely to Mackintosh's original designs, between 2014 and 2018. It was re-opened as working tea rooms in July 2018 and trades under the name "Mackintosh at The Willow". This follows a trademark dispute with the former operator of The Willow Tearooms which was resolved in 2017. This name is now used at tea room premises in Buchanan Street and was also additionally used at the Watt Brothers Department Store in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow between 2016 and its closure in 2019.
The Tea Rooms at 217 Sauchiehall Street first opened in 1903 and are the only surviving Tea Rooms designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh for local entrepreneur and patron Miss Catherine Cranston. Over the years and through various changes of ownership and use, the building had deteriorated until it was purchased in 2014 by The Willow Tea Rooms Trust in order to prevent the forced sale of the building, closure of the Tea Rooms and loss of its contents to collectors.
Background
Early in his career, in 1896, Mackintosh met Catherine Cranston (widely known as Kate Cranston or simply Miss Cranston), an entrepreneurial local business woman who was the daughter of a Glasgow tea merchant and a strong believer in temperance.
The temperance movement was becoming increasingly popular in Glasgow at the turn of the century and Miss Cranston had conceived the idea of a series of "art tearooms", venues where people could meet to relax and enjoy non-alcoholic refreshments in a variety of different "rooms" within the same building. This proved to be the start of a long working relationship between Miss Cranston and Mackintosh. Between 1896 and 1917 he designed and re-styled interiors in all four of her Glasgow tearooms, often in collaboration with his wife Margaret Macdonald.
The early tearooms
Mackintosh was engaged to design the wall murals of her new Buchanan Street tearooms in 1896. The tearooms had been designed and built by George Washington Browne of Edinburgh, with interiors and furnishings being designed by George Walton. Mackintosh designed stencilled friezes depicting opposing pairs of elongated female figures surrounded by roses for the ladies’ tearoom, the luncheon room and the smokers’ gallery.
In 1898, his next commission for the existing Argyle Street tearooms saw the design roles reversed, with Mackintosh designing the furniture and interiors, and Walton designing the wall murals. This was to see the first appearance of Mackintosh's trademark high-backed chair design. In 1900 Miss Cranston commissioned him to redesign an entire room in her Ingram Street tearooms, which resulted in the creation of the White Dining Room. Patrons entering the dining room from Ingram Street had to pass through a hallway separated from the room by a wooden screen with leaded glass inserts, offering tantalising glimpses of the experience to come.
This led to the commission to design completely the proposed new tearooms in Sauchiehall Street in 1903. For the first time, Mackintosh was given responsibility for not only the interior design and furniture, but also for the full detail of the internal layout and exterior architectural treatment. The resultant building came to be known as the Willow Tearooms, and is the best known and most important work that Mackintosh undertook for Miss Cranston.
The Willow Tearooms
The location selected by Miss Cranston for the new tearooms was a four-storey former warehouse building in a row of similar buildings erected around 1870 on the south side of Sauchiehall Street, between Wellington Street and Blythswood Street. These replaced original townhouses named Kensington Place, one of three such terraces built by William Harley. The street and surrounding area are part of the New Town of Blythswood created largely by William Harley of Blythswood Square in the early 1800s. The name "Sauchiehall" is derived from "saugh", the Scots word for a willow tree, and "haugh", meadow. This provided the starting point for Mackintosh and Macdonald's ideas for the design theme.