In the 19th century, Kilgraston House was known by the family as “the pink house”. From around 1800 until 1870 it was a busy home to Francis and John Grant and their respective families. It was a second home to the wider family and the door was always open to receive visitors, who enjoyed the congenial hospitality.

From 1930, Kilgraston, then a school, was also a happy place where the door was always open. But those doors will be closed later this month when the school closes due to financial circumstances. 

What will happen next to the pink house? It is a handsome mansion house reconstructed by Francis Grant around 1800, following its purchase a few years earlier by his brother when Chief Justice of Jamaica. Francis’s successors found the cost of maintaining the house impossible to sustain and Charles moved his family into the more manageable Drummonie House while Kilgraston was let to successive tenants, including Andrew Carnegie immediately following his marriage.

It is now not only a mansion house. All the ancillary buildings required in the 21st century for an independent school surround the house and there are all weather pitches, a chapel, a junior school in the old stables and a swimming pool. It will be interesting to see what happens next, but I hope that the two works by Mary Grant which are fixed to interior walls in the house will remain as a fitting tribute to her talent. Her sitters included Queen Victoria and she sculpted the lovely reredos (designed by John Oldrid Scott) in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh.