But why? Does nobody own this property?
So, just 45 minutes northwest of Glasgow, you can find an incredible-looking house. However: it’s surrounded (and hidden) by a chain mail box. Now, this raises a lot of inquiries and questions from us when we first saw the photos. Why was it necessary to surround it with the box? Did somebody trash the place before? Was the mailbox an art thing?
Well, this house, called The Hill House in Helensburgh, was made by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald. They were hired by Walter Blackie to create a modern villa on a plot of land. The home was finished in 1902 and Blackie’s family resided in it for decades. However, they passed it to the hands of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) because of water damage issues.
So here’s where the chain mail box comes in: the NTS decided that the way to protect this wonderful Scottish architecture was to encase it in the box. The chain mail umbrella has a roof that prevents the rain from hitting the house. It can also stop the elements from coming into the sides.
The chain mail box is composed of 34 million individual links and is considered to be the largest piece of chain mail in the world.
Image credit: REACH