A coalition of heritage and design groups has launched a last-minute attempt to save one of the UK’s most threatened modernist buildings, the former studio of textile designer Bernat Klein in the Scottish Borders. The category A-listed building, designed by architect Peter Womersley in 1972, has been vacant for decades and is in severe disrepair, featuring on the Scottish buildings at risk register since 2002.
To the surprise of heritage groups who had hoped to buy the property privately, its owners have put it up for auction through Savills with an indicative price of £18,000. The listing has forced the coalition, including the National Trust for Scotland, the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust and the Bernat Klein Foundation, to launch a fundraising appeal backed by the National Heritage Lottery Fund to try to buy it at auction on 30 July.
The studio, which won architectural awards for Womersley, is now vandalised, with smashed glass, rotting timber, crumbling concrete posts and barbed wire along the balustrades. Prof Alison Harley, chair of trustees for the Bernat Klein Foundation, said they had been in talks for months with the owners about a private sale and were disappointed by the sudden decision to auction it.
If secured, the coalition plans to restore the building to its original purpose as a design studio and public education centre. The restoration is expected to cost between £2.5m and £3m. Dr Samuel Gallacher, director of the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust, said the project could be an exemplar of how to save modernist and brutalist buildings in Scotland.
Klein, who survived the Holocaust and moved to the UK in 1945, became a renowned textile designer with clients including Chanel, Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. Womersley, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, designed the studio as a sculptural late modernist building with bold horizontal cantilevered concrete and finely framed vertical glazing.
