Quothquhan Lodge

Quothquhan Lodge is a shooting lodge built in 1937 by Basil Spence, designed in the style of a 17th and early 18th century traditional Scottish domestic building. It was commissioned for Alexander Galloway Erskine-Hill and Christian Hendry Colville and built as a hunting lodge. The design is said to consciously imitate the nearby Culter House, an early 18th century country estate.

The lodge is arranged around a splayed and staggered U-plan, focusing on a circular, walled and cobbled forecourt. The elevations are largely symmetrical, featuring sash windows with multi-pane glazing, although there are occasional asymmetrical miniature stair windows, bipartites, and double windows. The exterior is white-harled, with exposed cream ashlar base dressings and margins (built with brick beneath the harl), and grey slate roofs. Some chimney stacks have been reduced in height. The principal gables feature scroll-moulded skewputts, and the roof is steeply pitched with piended and gabled sections. The north and south elevations are two-storeys high, with a taller three-bay entrance block at the centre.

The north elevation, facing the forecourt, has a centre wallhead pediment with an oculus, and an open-pedimented stone doorpiece in a 17th century style, featuring a thistle finial, datestone and a mock marriage lintel. The south elevation, overlooking the garden, has a compact, symmetrical arrangement centered around a central block, flanked by projecting gabled bays. Windows are wider on the south front to allow more light to the principal rooms. A gabled L-plan east elevation incorporates a secondary door leading to a gunroom. The west wing contains service quarters, including a full-height bowed bay. A single-storey garage block extends west, linked to the house by a depressed-arched pend. The garage has two wide, west-facing vehicle bays with boarded and glazed sliding doors, scroll skewputts, and a slate roof. A bipartite window is located to the right of the garage block, serving a boiler house/laundry.

Inside, circulation is provided by circular entrance halls and passages at the front of the house on both floors, allowing the principal rooms to face south. The staircase has a simple balustrade of stripped pine, panelled doors, thick window astragals, and oak flooring. Walls are unadorned and white. Chimney-pieces vary in style; 17th and early 18th century revival bolection-moulded stone is used in the principal ground floor rooms, while bedrooms feature alternately polychrome brick with personalized devices in the children's rooms. A multitude of double and single-leaf doors are present, with heavy boarded and hinged doors in the attic.

The garage block is not visible from the east, where a ball-finialed pier terminates the harled enclosing walls of the forecourt. The enclosing walls are ashlar at the base, harled above, and have flat caps to the squat, circular, harled piers. A low rubble-built garden wall encloses a square terrace to the north, with widely-spaced balusters adjacent to the house. A flower garden and tennis court are located to the east of the house. A timber-louvred game-larder and a possible privvy or petrol pump are located north of the garage block. The lodge is set within a wider landscape featuring a ball-finialed pier and enclosing walls. Unsigned design drawings by Spence are held by the National Records of Scotland.