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Chinese Room by Charles Rennie Mackintosh with domino table, chairs, and screen - section in Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow. (photo - quezi.com, CC-BY)

In the 1890s tearooms flourished all over the UK, and nowhere more than in Glasgow. There you would find several city centre premises with a choice of rooms for customers taking tea – including separate rooms for ladies and gentlemen, and smoking rooms.  Those managed by the enterprising Miss Cranston, who asked designer-architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh to create stylish interiors, provided chic meeting places for a varied group of patrons. Each room had a distinct character, and attracted its own clientele.

Mackintosh used a Chinese theme for his redesign of the gentlemen’s room at the “Pioneer Suite” in Ingram Street. At the same time he had to provide facilities the men were used to – like games tables.  He designed domino tables for Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms over more than a decade.  They had a small round top where the game was laid out and four shelves lower down where players could put spare dominoes and cups of tea, perhaps squeezing in a small cake too.  Generally these tables are quite plain, stained wood with a four-plank “pedestal”, and yet they have a distinctive Rennie Mackintosh look.  There is one in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, another in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and one was sold at auction in London in 2002 for more than £45,000.  The 1911 “Chinese” domino table in the Glasgow Museums collection is rather different with thinner legs echoing the lines of its companion chairs.

Reconstructing the Chinese Room was a challenge for museum curator Andrew Stone.  The Ingram Street tearooms had been used as cheap shops and storage spaces, badly neglected, and then demolished in 1971 at a time when Mackintosh was not as fashionable and famous as he is now. Art historians recorded details of the decayed interiors, and what furnishings remained were taken into storage.  Years later, after studying old black-and-white photographs, and exploring layers of paint on wood saved from the premises, Stone began to recreate the original. The overall colour scheme, with a black ceiling, was quite dark by Mackintosh standards, despite the bright blue paint and upholstery and light-reflecting panels in the lattice screens.

Mackintosh was influenced by oriental design: more by “uncluttered” elements of Japanese style than the richly decorative chinoiserie popular in Europe for centuries.  His work can be understood in the context of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements, but is clearly original and not derivative.

However innovative and imaginative, Mackintosh’s interiors were always usable too.  The domino tables offered an elegant and practical way of playing a game and enjoying tea in a relatively small space.

Authoritative book on Mackintosh furniture: Charles Rennie Mackintosh

More on the tea rooms in Taking Tea with Mackintosh: The Story of Miss Cranston’s Tea Rooms