A couple’s dream home on Scotland’s rocky west coast is an audacious, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired feat of architecture
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uilding a bold new contemporary home directly on the British coastline is a tall order. Aside from the logistics of designing a house that functions successfully in such an unforgiving setting, planning permission is likely to make it a nonstarter. But on the shore of Loch Long on the Rosneath peninsula, 40 miles north-west of Glasgow, John MacKinnon and his wife Laura found a way to make it work for their house, Rock Cove. While the area is wild and ruggedly beautiful, its history has long been intertwined with the military and was once a brownfield site, home to disused Ministry of Defence huts and garages, overgrown and strewn with rubble.
Back in 2008, MacKinnon had bought a property on the same site, a 1940s cottage that had been repurposed as a navy signalling station. MacKinnon has a deep-seated passion for design, and worked closely with architect Stuart Cameron of Cameron Webster to completely reimagine this humble property as a modernist beach house, Cape Cove. He then began contemplating what could be done with the scruffy space alongside his new home.
“Having worked with Stuart before, it was easy for us to progress. We had countless conversations around how we could create a house there, making something out of an eyesore, without impinging on Cape Cove’s space or views. To make the most of a relatively small space, we started thinking about a house that juts out over the rocks below.” The brief MacKinnon provided was for a house that made the most of the incredible views by maximising the living space, as well as somewhere that would be future-proofed for the couple’s eventual retirement: on one level, step-free and easy to maintain.
