As some will have seen in the Courier, the Victorian mansion of Northwood in West Ferry has been bought by enthusiastic local couple Brenda and Scott Ettershank, who plan to turn it into serviced offices.
Originally called Corona, the Category B listed house was designed by George Shaw Aitken, a London-born architect who trained in Edinburgh and Manchester before joining James Maclaren’s practice in Dundee in 1869, becoming a partner in 1873. He then ran his own practice in Dundee from 1878 to 1881, before finishing his career in Edinburgh.
The house was designed in 1880 for Robert Aitken Mudie, a shipowner and coal merchant, and was described as two storeys with tower and irregular plan. Internally, it featured ceiling cornices and fine plasterwork with a Tudor rose motif. It had eighteen windows and a spiral staircase to the tower observation room.
On Mudie’s death, it was bought in 1910 by William Thomson, shipowner and brother of DC Thomson. He had married Clara Leng, daughter of publisher Sir John Leng, and was a Director of the Alliance Trust and President of the Chamber of Commerce in 1907. Thomson changed the name of the house to Northwood and added stained glass windows and a billiard room with Corinthian columns.
His son, Eric V Thomson, inherited the house and on his death it was sold to the Servite Housing Association in late 1985. Servite built housing in the grounds and finally, as Caledonia Housing, sold the mansion to the Ettershanks in 2025.
The Trust welcomes the plans to sensitively convert this important house to thirty serviced offices, retaining all the notable internal features. We have suggested that disabled parking and wheelchair access is better clarified and that the opportunity should be taken to add solar panels discreetly to the roof.
Graeme Hutton RSA is an Architecture Professor and photographer. He was formerly Professor of Architecture and Deputy Dean at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, where he worked for 26 years. Considered a ‘Pracademic’ by his colleagues, he has always married his work in education with a commitment to creative practice. As an educator he has used The City of Dundee and comparator European cities as contexts for speculative design projects. His close association working with the city led to him being central to the procurement of the V&A building and the new Dundee House city headquarters.
We restart our Winter Evening Talks on Thursday 17 October 2026 when Matthew Jarron will tell us about “The Origins of Dundee’s War Memorial”