Time-honoured materials and 21st-century sensibilities meet in a bothy on Mull

Words: Sonia Zhuravlyova

The stone ruins of a small fisherman’s cottage on the north coast of the Isle of Mull once belonged to Glasgow-based architect Peter Harford-Cross’s grandmother. When the building passed to his parents, they decided it was high time to bring the bothy back into shape. Peter’s uncle had put in a concrete floor, timber windows and a roof in the 1980s, but the structure remained a mere shell, with no creature comforts to speak of.

Peter and his wife, Rachel (together the pair make up Harford-Cross Architects), were tasked with turning it into a comfortable shelter that respected the bothy’s essential qualities, the family’s make-do-and-mend attitude and Mull’s wild, rugged character. To that end, the architects worked to preserve the story of its original use, but also its history during the 20th century. They carefully pointed the thick stone walls to make it airtight, used warm-hued plywood for cabinetry and internal cladding and added engineered wooden floors throughout, as well as natural slate and simple white tiles that surround the wood-burning range. The pared-back colour palette celebrates these natural, modest materials, while nearly all furniture and fittings have been sourced second-hand, including brass lighting upcylced from a ship.

Here, Rachel and Peter talk about the near-decade-long renovation process, from nascent plans to finished bothy – now a warm and welcoming bolthole for friends and family.

Rachel: “Part of our experience lies in restoring old buildings, having bought and done up three or four flats around Glasgow, accruing a lot of knowledge of working on listed structures in the process. And while the bothy on Mull isn’t listed, that sensitivity of approach informed our attempts to retain its character.”

Peter: “My parents were very keen not to lose the spirit of the place. The single central open space is crucial to that. It has such wonderful views and it would have seemed wrong to add partitions and to have it closed off. They didn’t want it to feel like it had been boxed up.”

Rachel: “Until this project, we hadn’t really appreciated how, when people were building these houses originally, they were much more attuned to the land and what was happening around them. In summer here, you can see the sun rising through a window at one end and setting through another. We realised that if we were to block the space, you wouldn’t be able to appreciate the incredible quality of light. It’s just beautifully aligned.”

Peter: “My mother wanted the house to be like a ship – where everything has its place. You have to use every bit of space in a creative way, with amenities tucked away.

“There are ruins like these all over island – and all over Scotland – though there aren’t many in their original form, certainly not on Mull. We don’t really know when the cottage originally dates to – at some point in the 19th century – though the roof had been added in the 1980s by my uncle, while the timbers are earlier, maybe from the wartime period. As well as the original parts, we wanted to preserve that layering too – the different things people had done to the building. If we had been starting from scratch, we might not have necessarily chosen that sort of shape for the roof, for instance, but because it was there, we wanted to celebrate it.

“We added a small kitchen, a bathroom and all the joinery and floors. We added Scandinavian birch-ply cladding to the walls and an engineered-timber floor. We were originally going to run the ply all the way around the place, but then decided the original stone was too lovely.”

Rachel: “We were driven in part by Peter’s grandparents’ post-war mentality – using as much as possible of what we could find, with a very light touch. I think that’s also a Mull mentality – when you’re living on an island, you can’t just nip to B&Q. You have to be quite resourceful. We wanted to have the same approach.”

Peter: “The nice thing is the way the walls zone particular spaces. Along the timber-clad wall at the back, which faces the cliff, for instance, there is stove and cupboards concealing a kitchen and a hot-water tank; in contrast, in the white-walled living space there are chairs and the dining table. And then at the other end, also wrapped in birch ply, is the sleeping area. That part has a little raised deck for very small people. We added a curtain, which pulls across the width of the house, the idea being that, although we’ve kept a single volume, different spaces have a different feeling within that volume.

“When we started, the walls were full of holes – the wind just blew through. Our contractor worked really hard to fill them all in; it was quite a labour of love. Wherever we added timber, we put a lot of wool insulation too. We did the same with the roof, but because we wanted to show its structure – it has some really nice large timbers – we insulated in between them. It was a bit of a balancing act between warmth and losing the qualities of the space.”

Rachel: “We made a conscious decision to try and source as much as we could that was second-hand. We felt this was somehow more in keeping with the spirit and history of the building and our general approach to its renovation. It felt appropriate to the rugged location and to outdoor island life. Peter made all the brass door handles and latches in his workshop too, as well as a few hooks. He also made a bench that fits into the boot room, to keep to that spirit of making things. The brass light fittings are all from a shop called Trinity Marine, which supplies items salvaged from ships. I like how they connect the rooms to the sea.

“There’s a bit of underfloor heating in the bathroom, otherwise we are pretty much reliant on the stove. It’s a tiny wee thing, but it’s amazing once it gets going. It powers the boiler and you can cook on it too.”

Peter: “The bothy isn’t off-grid but you can live in it in a totally off-grid manner, if you’d like to. You can be totally self-sufficient. And you do have the sense of seclusion when you’re here.”

Rachel: “I think that’s a really lovely aspect of it. Arriving here is quite cathartic: boarding a ferry, you feel you’re leaving the world behind. And when you get to the cottage, you can forget the rest of the world – it’s a proper escape.”

Photography: Alexander Baxter (1-4, 9, 10); Cal Douglas (5-8)