Cours' Hill

Cours’ Hill Cour House, built just a few miles to the north of Carradale in the 1920’s, was the first country house to be designed by the English architect Oliver Hill (1887 - 1968). After distinguished service in World War I, Hill had started off designing “Arts & Crafts” cottages and his design for Cour led to a further series of picturesque country cottages. Though Hill’s bent was essentially for visual values, colour and texture in materials and picturesque forms, Hill was an early exponent of “White” modernism and designing sleek ar deco interiors. Hill’s first plunge into modernism was ‘Joldwynds’, all white and full of geometric shapes and open decks. It was a disaster, the render failing and water dripping through the roof. Undeterred, Hill went on to build the Prospect Inn at Minster-on-Thanet, in Kent; The Midland Grand Hotel, in Morecambe and much of the seaside resort of Frintonon-Sea. Among the best known of Hill’s designs is ‘Landfall’, a modern-styled house echoing the great ocean liners of the age, built at Poole in 1936-38 and then his last project, ‘Long Newnton Priory’, in the style of the 1690’s, built in 1963. Hill’s delight was to take off for the weekend in his blue Rolls-Royce coupé, trimmed in pink, to Valewood Farm at Haslemere. Crammed with bric-à-brac, the old farmhouse had even a musical lavatory-paper dispenser, parrots and peacocks. A child at heart, Hill would don any absurd clothing to suit his mood and then take it off to surprise his house-guests into joining his nudist frolics on the hills in high summer. Hill had little regard for convention and was prone to being swept up in sudden enthusiasms. It was said that he became engaged to a new girl every spring, his elder sister having broken off the last engagement for him in the previous autumn ! It was Hill’s innocent charm which persuaded clients to let him realise his fantasies and the inter-war years were highly productive. The post-war years saw more designs than buildings, most still in the 1930’s style. Hill’s career was, he maintained, wrecked by Hitler and he never forgave him ! More of Oliver Hill’s story can be read in Alan Powers’ “Oliver Hill : Architect and Lover of Life” which was published by Mouton Publications in 1989. The original farmhouse being necessarily demolished, Cour was built by the Robert MacAlpine Construction Company between 1920 and 1922, local whinstone arriving at a small pier constructed at the south end of Cour Bay and brought up to the site on a small railway, the hundred-weight roofing slabs coming from Purbeck in Dorset and the oak from a crumbling and ruined castle in Wales. The kitchen’s marble floor was laid in strict secrecy by a team of Italian craftsmen. The first owner of the house was John Braidwood Gray, a Glasgow ship insurance broker and the house then later bought, in 1943, by the Nickerson family.