Cranston and Mackintosh tearooms

While Stuart Cranston created the original, it was his sister Kate who made her name as the first lady of the tearoom. With the help of her architect business partner, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who provided the avant-garde interiors, she created a tearoom legend in Glasgow which developed ‘sight of the city’ status on a par with the coffee houses of Vienna. Stylish Bohemians, and art lovers from all over the world came to view the Glasgow tearoom interiors, some fashioning their private houses in the Cranston-Mackintosh style right through to their crockery and cutlery. In the visual art world, it was an early 20th-century phenomenon, though neither Cranston nor Mackintosh became fabulously rich, Mackintosh dying in London, prematurely, and without resources in 1928.