 The plan was for a new building to accommodate all the students at Kilmahew House.It was a baronial mansion at the centre of the Kilmahew estate, a Victorian designed ornamental landscape created by the Burns family in the late 1800s.The mansion, built in 1865–1868, was originally a family home for James Burns and his son John, and later the Allan family, from the early 20th Century until just after the war, when the estate was sold to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Glasgow.