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Mansion House and associated designed landscape. A late 18th century French Neo-Classical house of the Boullee Ledoux School. Built by James Playfair for Charles Gordon 1791-7 with money from his Jamaican plantations to replace a house of 1782-3 designed by Robert Burn. Of outstanding merit inside and out. Main block 2-storey and basement 5-window centre with 3-storey advanced wings with pedimented ground floor tripartite windows. Tetra-style pedimented Roman-doric porch with steps and broken column pedestals (drawings for which were made by John Soane). Cast-iron columnar chimneys. Great 2-storey hemicycle of offices to rear with gables having proto-doric columns set in blind lunettes showing to main front. Remarkable pend arch in semi-circle of voussoirs diminishing in depth to crown, cupola over. There is a circular ice-house in the court aligned with a range of offices. Ground floor rooms are symmetrically planned, and very finely detailed throughout, including Egyptian-style billiard room behind entrance hall with decorative hieroglyphics, a library with a shallow-arched coffered ceiling reminiscent of Soane's work and a hall with Doric pilasters and a Greek frieze. Playfair's remodelling displays overt Masonic and Templar symbolism based upon the Temple of Solomon. Surrounded by a designed landscape, the original map of which hung in Cairness House in the early 1990s. At the south side of the lawn in front of the house is a Ha Ha. Cairness remained in Gordon hands until WWII when it passed to the Moir family. Gardens designed by Thomas White, a pupil of 'Capability' Brown', in 1791 but much of the land was reclaimed for agricultural use from the 1950s onwards following the felling of the woodland within the 400 acre estate. There is a walled garden to the south-east of the house (NK06SW0113).
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Historic Environment Records (HER)