The Architect of the Cleugh Manor, Richard Norman Shaw

Shaw was born in Edinburgh, and trained in the London office of William Burn with George Edmund Street and attended the Royal Academy classes, receiving a thorough grounding in classicism. In 1854 to 1856 he travelled with a Royal Academy scholarship, collecting sketches that were published as Architectural Sketches from the Continent, 1858. In 1872, Shaw was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy.

His picturesque early country houses avoided the current NeoGothic and academic styles, reviving vernacular materials like half timber and hanging tiles, with projecting gables and tall massive chimneys with inglenooks for warm seating. The result was free and fresh, not slavishly imitating his Jacobean and vernacular models, yet warmly familiar, a parallel to the Arts and Crafts movement. As his prowess developed, he dropped some of the mannered detailing, his buildings gained in dignity, and acquired an air of serenity and quiet homely charm which were less conspicuous in his earlier works, half timber construction was more sparingly used, and finally disappeared entirely.