Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room To Be Displayed At V&A Dundee

A long lost tearoom - created by Charles Rennie Mackintosh - is to be conserved and restored for the V&A in Dundee.

It was the largest interior designed for the iconic Miss Cranston's Ingram Street Tearooms in Glasgow - and hasn't been seen for 50 years.

It's now been announced it'll take centre stage at the museum when it opens in 2018.

Philip Long’s the director of V&A Dundee:

Philip Long said: "V&A Dundee will celebrate the best of Scottish and international design creativity.

"When we set about planning the Scottish Design Galleries for V&A Dundee it was vital Mackintosh, recognised around the world as one of the great and most influential of designers, was represented appropriately.

"It is extremely fitting that the public will be able to see such a major work by him at the heart of that story.

“We are delighted to work jointly with Glasgow Life on the conservation and restoration of this important historic interior and to draw on their extensive Mackintosh expertise.

"We are also very grateful to Glasgow Life for their generous loan of the tearoom and to the Heritage Lottery Fund Scotland which is fully funding this project alongside its major contribution to the realisation of V&A Dundee itself.”

At 13.5 metres long, the Oak Room is described as ‘the sleeping giant’ of the Ingram Street tearoom. Staff from Glasgow Museums and the V&A Dundee will work together on the conservation and reconstruction project.

The double-height Oak Room, designed by Mackintosh in 1907 and completed in 1908, is acknowledged as an important interior that would inform his design ideas for the Glasgow School of Art Library, which was completed a year later in 1909.

The interior last functioned as a tearoom in the early 1950s. Only a very small part of the room has ever been on display at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum since the interior’s removal from the original building in 1971.

The conservation, restoration and reassembly of the Oak Room will be complex.

When the tearooms were removed each room was numbered, each wall given a reference, and each piece of panelling coded.

Plans and elevations of the rooms were drawn to show how everything fitted together. Between 2004-5, with the help of this coded information Glasgow Museums quantified and documented all surviving Oak Room panelling.