The Swilken, 18 The Links, St Andrews

The Swilken, located at 18 The Links in St Andrews, is a two-storey Arts and Crafts house built in 1914 by J Donald Mills, originally remodeled from a small Victorian house. It sits on a cramped site surrounded by earlier buildings and features a harled and whitewashed exterior with minimal stone dressings at the cills and the coping of the parapet. The design is asymmetrical, with a broad cubic mass and a stepped parapet. On the left side, there is a five-light casement bow, while a short recessed link connects to a circular conical roofed tower bay with three-light windows that project forward from the adjoining building on the right.

A first-floor balcony with a timber rail on square piers follows the street line at an acute angle to the main facade, embracing an earlier three-light canted bay and creating a deep open porch of irregular quadrilateral shape on the left. The glazing consists of sash windows, with the upper sashes having six panes, except for the bow and a small weatherboarded oriel that was added over the balcony door in 1922.

Inside, the house retains an unspoiled Arts and Crafts interior, featuring a hall, stair, and first-floor gallery all wainscotted in simple arched wood rectangles. The vestibule leads through a semi-elliptically arched recess to the hall, where the stair rises into the gallery, which has a barrel vault stained to match the wainscot. Lunette paintings depicting figures in idyllic landscapes by Shields adorn both ends of the gallery. An unusual semi-elliptically arched door with an oval light adds to the character of the space.

Notable interior details include Dutch tile chimney pieces in the ground floor hall and the first-floor drawing room, a barrel-shaped pendant wall light made of brass in the hall, a late Georgian neo-Tudor grate made of cast iron and brass, and quarter-circled steps leading to the drawing room in the gallery. Additionally, there is a slim reeded-pilaster piano dais recess with a five-light window band in the drawing room.