John Keppie and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

The properties at Haddington Park date from the late 19th Century.  For many years the western half og the property was the home of John Keppie the architect.

John Keppie was born in Glasgow on 4 August 1862, the fourth child and elder son of John Keppie, a wealthy tobacco importer who came from Haddington and had houses in Hillhead and Prestwick. His mother was Helen Cuthbertson Hopkins, who originated from Galston.

Keppie was educated at Ayr Academy. He was brought up in Prestwick rather than Hillhead.

Keppie was articled to Campbell Douglas and Sellars c.1880 and somewhat unusually attended classes at the University of Glasgow as well as Glasgow School of Art. Although his dossier is missing he appears to have enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Atelier Jean Louis Pascal in 1885 and remained there until at least the autumn of 1886 when he travelled in Northern Italy.

On his return to the Campbell Douglas & Sellars office he assisted Sellars with the firm's entry for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, the competition for which had been advertised in January 1887 and was won on 31 March 1887 with a weather-boarded design with galvanised metal domes in a Moorish, probably basically French colonial, idiom.  Keppie was familiar with the Moorish buildings in Grenada; the south Ayrshire Council art collections include two large watercolours of the Alhambra by John Keppie, presumably gifted to the collection by the artist or his survivors.

While the Exhibition buildings were completed on schedule the project was fraught with difficulties as Campbell Douglas became seriously ill and was unable to come downstairs to the office for months. This put a severe strain on Sellars and Keppie.

Following the death of Sellars, Keppie was taken into partnership by John Honeyman whose practice was then chronically short of work and money: he effectively refounded the practice, Douglas having allowed him to take the commission for the uncompleted Anderson's College of Medicine with him as a setting-up commission. 

At the end of his first year in practice Keppie's father died and he and his brother found themselves responsible for their mother and four sisters: of his sisters he was closest to the youngest, Jessie, born in 1868.

In the early to mid 1890s Herbert MacNair, whom he had inherited from Honeyman, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whom he had inherited in April 1889, were frequently guests working week-ends at Prestwick, while Jessie brought a circle of friends from Glasgow School of Art who were put up at two bungalows rented by her brother at Dunure ('The Roaring Camp'). There Mackintosh formed some sort of attachment to Jessie, while the well-off Macnair courted Frances Macdonald. In the event Mackintosh transferred his affections to Frances's elder sister Margaret and with that event this group (The Immortals) seems to have disbanded: Mackintosh, Macnair and the Macdonald sisters forming a smaller group known as The Four

Although Keppie remained a superb draughtsman and watercolourist, from the early 1890s Keppie was at first content to let Mackintosh do most of the designing, particularly on competition work. Even after Mackintosh left Jessie for Margaret, an event which apparently caused Jessie long-lasting distress, this arrangement continued although the working weekends at Prestwick necessarily came to an end: personal problems were set aside in the desire to win competitions and build up the practice.

In 1891, the property (now 4 Station Road) was then known as Haddington Park West, in tribute to the birthplace of John and James Keppie’s father.  The census in that year shows the occupants as David Spence Riddoch, his wife Elizabeth Keppie Riddoch, their infant son James Keppie Riddoch, David’s sister Annie Spence Riddoch, his sister-in-law Helen Keppie and her husband, John Henderson.

Keppie died at his house, Haddington Park West, Prestwick on 28 April 1945. He left £40,931 3s 6d, bequeathing £2,000 to Graham Henderson and his MacNicol picture to Glasgow Art Gallery. He was buried in Prestwick and Monkton Cemetery where a characteristic early Renaissance monument commemorates him and his sisters.

Keppie acted as advisor to Glasgow Corporation for its massive council house building programme after the First World War.

Keppie designed the bell tower some of the furnishings and additions to Prestwick North Church.

[Based on the Dictionary of Scottish Architects and information provided by Helen Campbell.]