Located on the Sandgate in Ayr, one of the oldest secular buildings in the medieval Royal Burgh, said to have belonged to Lord Elias Cathcart in the 18th century, who named it after his wife.

In the 1850's it was for some years the Ayr Branch of the infamous City of Glasgow Bank (that went on to fail spectacularly in 1878)

 In the 1980's it belonged to the Bank of Scotland, who donated it to the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust and thus saved it from demolition as it was in poor structural condition by then and there had been talk of pulling it down.

Extensive repairs were completed about 10 years ago - funded by Historic Scotland, Enterprise Ayrshire, the South Ayrshire Council and the Civic Society.

It was in this House that one of Ayrshire's famous sons was born in 1756. This was the road building engineer John Loudon McAdam (sometimes spelled Macadam).

Following a short period in America where he reputedly made a fortune, he returned to Scotland where bought an estate (between Ayr and Maybole) and, on being elected a member of the Ayrshire Turnpike Trustees, he experimented - at his own expense - new methods of constructing roads with layers of broken stones, the stone of each successive layer reducing in dimension, until a smooth and hard surface was achieved.

In 1827 he was appointed Surveyor General of Roads for the whole of Britain and it is acknowledged his roads made a great contribution to industrial and social progress in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Local tradition in Ayrshire has it that the first 'macadamised' section of roadway was part of the Culzean Road, Maybole. The great man died in 1836.