Jim Duncan started his working life as a nine-year-old bookie’s runner in Govan. He has enjoyed a colourful career as an entrepreneur, restaurateur and even “for about 15 minutes” the owner of Ayr United football club. His happiest times, though, have been in the home he has created over 30 years in Pollokshields.

Now 61, Duncan is reluctantly putting his house up for sale, intending to spend an increasing part of the year in the sunnier climes of Florida and maintain a downsized base in Glasgow.

Athole Lodge is a six-bedroom, Victorian sandstone villa that, under Duncan’s ownership, has been remodelled to combine the best of the 19th and 21st centuries. A minor fire three years ago was all the excuse he needed to let his ambition run wild. It didn’t stop until he had spent £1.8m — £450,000 than today’s asking price.

Duncan, also a former electrician, has created a monument to craftsmanship full of hidden technology. As Peter Gillespie, of selling agent Savills, says: “Even the utility room, that forlorn afterthought in most people’s homes, is better kitted out than the kitchens in many equivalent country houses.”

As for the kitchen, it is considered to be the best example of a Clive Christian design in Scotland: taking up 1,000 sq ft of floorspace, it could probably contain most one-bedroom flats.

The period features and traditional proportions remain intact but Athole Lodge is also home to a battery of home entertainment and security features that subtly redefine the term “smart home”.

It has a mouthwatering roll call of top-name brand appliances: a Sub-zero fridge, Wolf broiler and Falcon ice-maker, CUE-controlled integrated entertainment system, bathroom flatscreen television and a “counter current” self-cleaning exercise pool. This has a wave machine that will simulate anything from boating-pond calm to the heave of the English channel.

However, this is a designer home that doesn’t want to wear its ultra-modern heart on its sleeve. “It is always a difficult balancing act,” says Duncan. “How do you build modern-day comforts into a traditional period home?

“Taste is a personal thing and people might take issue with certain things but I think no one would argue that this hasn’t been thoughtfully upgraded or say that changes we’ve made are contrary to the spirit of the house.”

His implication is clear: this is a house that is as much about the antique rhododendrons and pre-Raphaelite artworks as it is about the Joseph Beuys originals and metal halide, fibre-optic lighting. Athole Lodge is a rare example of a period home at ease with its contemporary additions.

As such, its discreet authority makes it the perfect poster child for its environs — the similarly smart but equally limelight-shunning Pollokshields.

Pollokshields was established 160 years ago by the Stirling-Maxwells of Nether Pollok, grandees who had made Pollok House their family seat in the 18th century. Though the family’s association with the area goes back to 1270 and their former home, Haggs Castle, built in 1585, is Glasgow’s oldest surviving residential property, their greatest bequest to the city was a flair for urban planning that informed the blueprint for the Edwardian Garden City Movement.

In the postwar years Pollokshields’ villas suffered, as elsewhere, from a change of fashion, with these ornate, wonderfully idiosyncratic homes deemed unwieldy and too costly to maintain in austere times. However, the advent of modern trades techniques and labour-saving gadgets brought them into favour once more and ensured that today’s wealthy owners don’t need a phalanx of servants to run their households.

Duncan believes that a new generation of high-wealth but low-profile residents, drawn from business, the professions and the entertainment industry, are notable for their emotional and economic investment in the area.

The likes of Charan Gill, the Ashoka curry king, the television presenter Carol Smillie and Chris Trainer, the chief executive of Forrest Developments, are the new kids on the block, replacing household names of yesteryear such as the entertainers Jimmy Logan and Moira Anderson and the footballer Jim Baxter.

When people move in, they tend to stay. As a result, the best homes that come on the market in the likes of Springkell Avenue and around Albert Drive and Nithsdale Road carry a premium caused by scarcity. Athole Lodge’s £1.35m price tag is worth putting in context, says Gillespie.

“This house, in a comparable location in London, would change hands for £12m and it is no surprise that the interest to date has been a combination of locals trading up and people from down south,” he says. “Both constituencies can immediately see the value of what is on offer here.”

Athole Lodge is on the market with Savills at offers over £1.35m, 0141 222 5896

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