Book Description

In 1896, Kate Cranston, the pioneer of Glasgow tea rooms in the late nineteenth century, commissioned Charles Rennie Mackintosh -- who would become one of the Western world's most renowned designers -- to design her tea rooms, and over the next two decades he did so with dazzling inventiveness. (Mackintosh's wife, Margaret, herself an artist, also made important contributions to the interior designs.) A pair of perfectionists, Cranston and Mackintosh opened up a unique, avant-garde artistic world to thousands of ordinary people. Their tea rooms became internationally famous. Taking Tea with Mackintosh illustrates this exciting collaboration with black-and-white historical photographs of the tea rooms and color photographs of their surviving components. In addition, sixteen recipes for traditional tea room cakes, breads, and pastries are supplied, offering the best chance the reader will have to revisit these extraordinary places.