WHERE St Peter’s Seminary as an architectural gem is concerned, I’ve always been, at best, agnostic.

Many of my friends in the architectural world go into swoon mode at the centrepiece of the Kilmahew Estate, and can barely contain their grief at its being allowed to fall into the current ruinous state. And it is still an A-listed building for all that.

I suppose my basic problem is I’m no fan of the brutalist school, and this paean to concrete has always seemed too emblematic of that genre. Just mark me down in the Philistine column on this one.

Anyway, the estate has new owners, and the latter have big plans for it. Nothing less than creating a world heritage centre at an estimated cost north of £100 million and carrying estimated visitor numbers of 375,000 per year and a turnover of £12.5m.

The scale of the new owners’ ambition is certainly impressive. Yet however worthwhile their previous credentials, they are a husband and wife team, and they’re bidding to succeed where some heavy duty professionals have failed.

READ MORE: Could St Peter's Seminary in Cardross be part of Scotland's next World Heritage Site?

I felt desperately sorry for the NVA arts company who made the most progress with the seminary, ultimately using it as the site for Hinterland, a spectacular light show in 2016 which did indeed attract visitors from near and far.

They had more modest plans for community gardens and an extensive clean-up and were well on the way to fulfilling these aims when the lack of core funding dried up, and the company itself went out of business in 2018.

In my book, this was a greater loss than the seminary, given that NVA had a terrific track record in producing fabulous, and fabulously different, spectacles in natural settings as various as Arthur’s Seat and Skye, and several global sites. They were truly innovative, and their Hinterland production at St Peter’s was a thing of wonder.

If a company like that, with a serious track record, could lose its own shirt backing a project at Kilmahew, then I’m sceptical that two people, however talented, will fare better.

Having said all that, I’d be more than delighted to be proved wrong.