By Hugo Macdonald
This essay first appeared in the 2024 Summit Guide, printed for the Design Leadership Summit in Edinburgh.
It has been two years since my husband James and I opened the doors to Bard in Scotland’s oldest customs house overlooking the water in the Port of Leith. For several years prior, we had dreamt of building a home for Scottish craft and design. In the heady days of pandemic lockdowns, together we determined that the perfect time was unlikely to present itself, and perhaps this life-changing hiatus was just the nudge we needed to turn our dreams into a reality. Carpe diem and all that.
The seeds had been sown for such a project over countless trips around Scotland and the islands in the fifteen years that James and I have been together. I grew up on the Isle of Skye, which is where my family have been based for centuries. I will be the 38th chief of the Macdonald Clan, the largest and oldest of the highland clans. Scotland is in my bones and blood, and searching for clues and cues about Scottish identity is an ongoing quest. It’s not so much an act of jingoism as a heartfelt desire to understand our sense of self: people of place; past, present and perhaps even future. We share a belief that design and craft are powerful conduits for soulful connection across time and culture, expressions of knowledge, born from need, manifest in material.
I’m a design critic and curator, currently the Global Design Director at Wallpaper*. James is an architect and designer, specializing in historic buildings, salvaged materials, and craft commissioning for architectural projects. He has designed homes for Helena Bonham-Carter and Eddie Redmayne, shops for Perfumer H and Bella Freud, and hotels in a medieval coaching inn and a baronial hunting lodge. Together we are interested in the potential for design and craft to ground and elevate the worlds we inhabit.
Our appetite to open a home for Scottish craft and design was whetted by our repeated discovery of gutsy people making wonderful things of extraordinary breadth and depth all over Scotland. It mystified us that literally millions of people visit Scotland each year with a vested interest in learning about their ancestral culture, and they would leave with plaid cashmere scarves (definitely not made in Scotland) and Loch Ness monster fridge magnets. The commodification of Scottish cultural identity has been rapacious but somewhere along the line quality and integrity have been subsumed by emblematic gimmickry.
We opened Bard as a small but mighty rock against the flood of tartan shortbread tins. Today we work with around 60 craftspeople and workshops across Scotland, providing a platform to show, sell, and commission their work as well as facilitating their involvement within architectural and design projects. From leather to glass, willow to wool, straw to stone, ocean plastic to native woods and clays, we present a cultural census of Scottish craft, historic and contemporary, in a domestic setting rather than on plinths or behind glass. Our mission is to liberate craft into daily life and use, away from hallowed pedestals and whispery adulation. Perhaps more importantly we tell the stories of the people we work with to keep the knowledge they practise alive. Historically, the highland clans would have a bard in their retinue to proclaim tales of their chiefly deeds. We tell stories about the ingenuity of the people we work with; they tend to be about battles with materials and processes, not each other.
So just what makes Scottish craft different from craft of any other land? It’s a question we field frequently, and one with no simple answer. Craft, of course, does not respect borders. Yet craft is inherently “of place” and this is what makes it compelling: its specificity. Craft can be totally unique and fascinating as a result; in other cases it can be familiar in its universality–and comforting in its revelation that there’s more that unites than separates us.
In the case of Scotland, there’s a hardiness and ingenuity to much of our craft traditions here. We feel this is born from historic scarcity of resources in far flung and island communities, which leads to a canniness in their use – a resourcefulness that is such an embedded part of Scottish culture, generally. In places where trees were scarce, driftwood from shipwrecks was prized for seats of chairs, while straw was woven to make hooded backs to shelter their occupants from the drought. Ingenuity comes from naturally curious and questioning mindsets. The Scots have invented a lot of things: penicillin, the steam-powered engine; chicken tikka masala. Notably, we invented the toaster before sliced bread.
There’s a robustness in Scottish craft traditions too; a solidity to withstand repeated use indoors and outdoors, inclement weather, and with the expectation that furniture and objects would be passed down generations, fixed and repaired for several lifetimes, and still be fit for purpose. Straw is more scarce than it once was and we witness ocean plastic and ghost rope entering the lexicon of material use in its place.
Beyond necessities, there’s an interesting reverence for domestic life in Scotland. At the 5000-year old Neolithic site of Skara Brae in Orkney, alongside built in beds and fireplaces, each dwelling had a built-in stone dresser or storage wall – somewhere between a sideboard and an altar, which archaeologists believe was used for displaying valuable objects: tools, pots, baskets, talismans perhaps. In many homes in Scotland today, you find collected objects and ephemera displayed on deep sills and ledges; bones, stones, feathers and shells reveal a love for the wild and weird offerings from land and sea.
Scots have an in-built love for beauty. The knitters of Fair Isle incorporated intricate patterns into their woollen goods for little more than joy. The intricacy of chip-carved furniture and the sploshy decoration of spongeware ceramics serve no practical purpose other than to add refinement and delight, to make objects of daily use that bit more special. We Scots take pride in doing things properly and beautifully, perhaps matching the majesty and drama of our surrounding environments in the human made buildings, interiors, textiles, and furniture that shelter us and connect us to life at large indoors and beyond.
We tell all of these stories and many more in the craft and design which we have given a home at Bard. It is a social and cultural project; it is also a personal and passionate endeavour with an anthropological subtext. One of the greatest joys is welcoming people of all ages, from all places, through our doors and witnessing them fall upon different pieces within our collection. We encourage people to sit, touch, and smell, understanding that we learn about craft through all of our senses, not only sight. We have people who remember their grandmothers making baskets or weaving particular patterns. We have others who query if 3D-printed bioplastics belong in the realm of craft alongside stoneware vessels and wooden furniture. Everything is a starting point for a conversation about the role craft plays in forging cultural identity, and the value it has to us today in contemporary life. Who could argue against the power of resourcefulness, ingenuity, and beauty?