In 2018 there are three Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow.  The original, commissioned by Kate Cranston and designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh opened on Sauchiehall Street in 1903.  The other two are located on Buchannan Street and inside the Watt Brothers department store.  Whilst these tea rooms were inspired by Mackintosh and decorated and furnished in the style of the original tea room, they have a different ownership and a much more recent genesis being established in 1983. 

Catherine Cranston was the daughter of a Glasgow tea merchant and avid follower of the temperance movement.  She owned a number of tea rooms in Glasgow and she had a long working relationship with Mackintosh, who over the years designed and re-styled her various tea rooms.  The Willow Tea Rooms commission was Mackintosh’s opportunity to design the inside and outside of the building and along with his wife to decorate it with their art work. 

Cranston’s Willow was made up of a number of rooms of which his “Room de Luxe” (or Salon de Luxe) was the grandest.  The Kelvingrove Art Gallery has a reproduction of the Room de Luxe that you can see below. 




Catherine Cranston’s involvement in the tea room business came to an end in 1917, after the death of her husband.  In the decades that followed the Willow Tea Rooms went through a number of changes especially to the facade as it was passed from one new owner to another.  In 2014 the building was purchased by a local businesswoman anxious to ensure that the building and contents were preserved.  What followed was a £10m restoration of the building by “The Willow Tea Room Trust”.  The plan was to complete the restoration of the building in time for Mackintosh’s 150th Anniversary in June of 2018 but when I visited in July of that year work was still underway. 

The reason for the renaming of the Willow Tea Room is that in 1983 Anne Mulhern opened her own version of the Willow Tea Room first on Buchanan Street and then on the 3rd floor of the Watt Brothers department store on Sauchiehall Street.