House for an Art Lover was built in the 1990's to a design by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

I was commissioned to photograph House for an Art Lover in 2008, and I remember seeing the iconic facade for the first time in Bellahouston Park. After years of travelling around and learning about the history of architecture, I was struck by how unique this building was.

The frieze encapsulates the essence of a style that went on to populate the world through a niche movement called Art Nouveau.

Mackintosh combined the Scottish vernacular with his own genius for originality and left us with a message that tells us originality can exist alongside tradition.

There is something else here too. By drawing upon the nutrients of the past, we can create something entirely new. And in bringing an historic design or idea into being, we do more than reproduce it – we enter, however briefly, the zeitgeist that formed it, and perhaps come a little closer to understanding the mind of the genius who imagined it.

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