A sandstone house, held above the parkland.

Greenfield House was raised between 1892 and 1894 to the designs of the Edinburgh architects A. G. Sidney Mitchell & Wilson.

It was built for David Paton Thomson — a director of John Paton, Son & Co. Ltd, the great Alloa spinning firm, and a former Deputy Lieutenant of Clackmannanshire. Set in flat parkland north of the town's shopping streets, the manor was elegantly appointed and hung with a fine collection of art.

Around it lay the full apparatus of a Victorian estate: a walled garden, greenhouses, a stable block, and a lodge house guarding each of its two entrances.

Greenfield was the work of one of late-Victorian Scotland's most fashionable practices — A. G. Sydney Mitchell & Wilson.

Arthur George Sydney Mitchell (1856–1930) was born at Larbert, a little south of Alloa, the son of Sir Arthur Mitchell, a Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland. Articled to the great Robert Rowand Anderson in 1878, he set up on his own account in Edinburgh in 1883, aged just twenty-seven, and around 1887 took the older George Wilson — a former hand of David Bryce and Anderson — into partnership.

Appointed architect both to the Commercial Bank of Scotland and to the Board of Lunacy, the firm ranged across banks, country houses, churches and hospitals, and is best remembered for two romantic Edinburgh housing schemes. Mitchell retired to Gullane around 1910 and died there in 1930.

Greenfield is the domestic face of an industrial fortune — that of John Paton, Son & Co., spinners of Alloa.

In 1814 John Paton set up a wool-dyeing and spinning business in the town, raising Kilncraigs Mill on the site of the Kilncraig House he had inherited, and taking up Samuel Crompton's spinning mule; worsted yarns followed from 1816. Under his son Alexander the firm became Paton and Son, and grew until Kilncraigs employed many thousands of Alloa folk.

It was one of the firm's directors, David Paton Thomson, who built Greenfield in the 1890s. In 1920 the company merged with J. & J. Baldwin to form the knitting-wool giant Patons & Baldwins, which moved its headquarters and six factories to Darlington. Spinning finally ceased at Kilncraigs in 1999 — the mill now houses, fittingly, Clackmannanshire Council.

After eight years standing empty, Greenfield House has been made wind- and watertight once again.

A programme of roughly £1 million, led by the Procast Group for Clackmannanshire Council, completed its first two phases on time and on budget — the opening moves in a longer effort to return the manor to public life, with hopes it may serve as a cultural and heritage centre.

When the council left Greenfield in 2014, it moved to Kilncraigs — the converted Paton's mill in the town centre, and the very firm whose director built the house more than a century before. The two buildings bookend the same story.