With love from us to you

With St Valentine’s Day around the corner the McAteer Photo team got chatting about the ‘L word’.

We’re all big romantics at heart (even if we don’t care to admit it) and when we were thinking about what we’ve photographed that would symbolise love we came up with some weird and wonderful suggestions, from synthetic heart valves that we photographed for a life sciences shoot at Vascutek to heart shaped cakes and tarts for Europe’s largest sugar producer, Sudzuker and the body of St Valentine (literally) that we photographed this week for Scotland is Now to accompany their Love Scotland campaign social media posts (btw, the relics can be found in a Franciscan church in Glasgow’s Gorbals if you’re interested in a wee romatic (?) trip with your loved one).

But we all agree, perhaps the most enchanting notions linked to our photos involve the great romantic coupling of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald whose buildings, furniture, artworks and textiles are rife with symbolism celebrating the sentiment of love – both their shared love of nature as well as their love for each other.

There’s no doubt that these two were so much in love, sticking together through very hard times. Mackintosh’s letters to Margaret, written around 1927 after they moved to France penniless, were known and published as ‘The Chronycle’. In one of the letters he writes, “You must remember that in all of my architectural effort you have been the half, if not three quarters of them.”

Charles – you’re such a romantic. Sigh…..

See more of our interior architectural photographs here.