Charles George Hood Kinnear was born at Kinloch, Fife on 30 May 1830, the second son of Charles Kinnear of Kinnear and Kinloch and a member of the banking family of Thomas Kinnear & Company. His mother was Christian Jane Greenshields, only child of the wealthy Edinburgh advocate John Boyd Greenshields who had married Jane Boyd, heiress to the small Dunbartonshire estate of Drum and adopted her name as an additional surname. Charles Kinnear was educated privately with his elder brother, the London advocate, politician and radical journalist John Boyd Kinnear whom he followed to Edinburgh University prior to being articled to William Burn and David Bryce in 1849; his home address was then his Greenshields grandmother's house at 125 Princes Street.
Kinnear appears to have joined the office of John Dick Peddie (born 1824) on a part-time basis late in 1853 or early in 1854 when his handwriting appears on the detail sheets for the Sir Michael Street Church in Greenock, but by that date he was already undertaking study tours, sketches still in the possession of the family showing that he was in Palermo on 9 March 1853 and Pisa on 13 December 1854. Shortly after returning home from the second tour he set up his own household at 17 Alva Street and commenced an independent practice which seems to have consisted only of improvements on the Kinnear and Kinloch estates.
The rapid expansion of Peddie's practice during those years, especially with the influx of Royal Bank work, induced him to take Kinnear into partnership. Kinnear had capital to inject into the business and was skilled in 'Old Scots', the latter a specific requirement for the Cockburn Street development in the Old Town: the Improvement Act of 1827 had set the precedent of 'Old Scots or Flemish' for developments there. The partnership appears to have commenced on 1 January 1856 although his RIBA nomination form gives the year as 1855, probably the date of the agreement. Thereafter Kinnear took charge of the drawing office, Burn & Bryce drawing office methods being consistently adopted with nearly all the drawings signed in Kinnear's handwriting.
By the time the partnership had been formed, Kinnear had become deeply interested in photography, perhaps through his former master David Bryce, who was also a pioneer photographer. Together with the architect David MacGibbon and Sir David Brewster, Bryce and Kinnear co-founded the Photographic Society of Scotland in 1856, Brewster being president and Kinnear secretary. In the same year Kinnear made a photographic study tour which embraced Milan; and in the following year, 1857, he invented the first bellows camera, which was made for him by a Mr Bell of Potterrow. He took it on a study tour of northern France, followed by another in Germany.
Kinnear was able to make these study tours through inheritance. When he came of age in 1852 he fell heir to a large number of Edinburgh properties from his Greenshields grandfather, and on the death of his grandmother in 1856 he also came into full possession of 125 Princes Street and the estate of Drum. One of these houses, 12 Howe Street, provided the larger premises the partnership required. Family connections were reinforced by volunteer connections from 1859 onwards when he joined the First Midlothian County (Midlothian Coast) Artillery Volunteer Brigade. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in July 1860 and quickly rose to become captain of the Portobello battery, then second major, and as senior major one of the three officers who financed the building of the regimental headquarters in Grindlay Street in 1866.
From the very beginning the partnership was hugely successful as commissions for major public buildings and churches flowed in: Dublin Street Baptist Church in Edinburgh in 1856; the Scottish Provident Institute in Edinburgh, where Donald Smith Peddie was on the board, in 1858; Morrison's Academy in Crieff in 1859; and Morgan's Hospital in Dundee in 1860. They also had considerable success in competitions, winning that for Sydney Place UP Church in Glasgow in 1857 and coming second for the Wallace Monument and St Mary's Free Church, Edinburgh in 1858, the design for the latter being realised at Pilrig Free Church in the same city in 1860. In 1861 they won that for Aberdeen Sheriff Court, which grew into the much larger municipal buildings project in the following year. The single major disappointment was the reconstruction and enlargement of the Bank of Scotland Head Office in Edinburgh, commissioned by the Treasurer Alexander Blair in the autumn of 1859 but retrieved by David Bryce from his successor after Kinnear was instructed to seek his opinion on their designs. Peddie & Kinnear were, however, given all of the bank's provincial branch business, and after initially building some relatively simple Italianate structures, Kinnear followed David MacGibbon's lead in adopting a Scots vernacular idiom as the bank's house style for new construction. This greatly increased volume of business required a larger office, 3 South Charlotte Street being bought for the purpose in 1866.
The practice's prosperity also led to a marked increase in the social standing of the partners, expressed first in Peddie's large terrace house at 21 Claremont Crescent, built in 1860, and then in a much grander one at 33 Buckingham Terrace, built along with number 34 in 1866. Not long thereafter Peddie also rented from the Countess of Seafield the estate of Muckrach in Inverness-shire, primarily for the fishing. Election as ARSA followed in 1868, and full academician and treasurer only two years later. The Academy was to become a showcase for his ambitious proposals for Princes Street, an interest which seems to have stemmed from his North British Station and Waverley Market competition designs of 1866 and the unbuilt Caledonian Hotel scheme of 1868, the biggest disappointment of Peddie's career.
Kinnear does not seem to have lived on his inherited estate very much, but his landed status brought useful connections for country house and county buildings work and by the early 1860s he had begun to be a serious rival to Bryce and Wardrop. He had particularly good connections in Dumfries & Galloway, and it was through his work there that he met his wife Jessie Jane Maxwell, daughter of Wellwood Maxwell of Munches, whom he married on 29 August 1868. The marriage brought extensive family connections which were to remain important to the practice long after Kinnear's death.
To keep their office continuously employed, Peddie & Kinnear began building speculatively in Edinburgh from the mid-1860s, taking over the Grosvenor Crescent section of Robert Matheson's West Coates development in which the Kinnears took a house and stables. This development sold well and was extended into Palmerston Place. As a result of the a relative dearth of commissions for public buildings, now increasingly determined by open competition, the partners set about creating new business through property, hydropathic and hotel companies in which they and a select circle of business associates were the major shareholders, a tactic made less hazardous by the Limited Liability Act of 1855 and the Companies Act of 1862. The first of these were the Heritable Securities Association and the Scottish Lands and Buildings Company, founded in 1862 and 1864 respectively, followed by the Craiglockhart Estates Company in 1873 and a number of smaller companies. Nearly all of these were managed by the Edinburgh chartered accountant Alexander Thomas Niven. Their authorised capital was not fully paid up, the balance being met by advertising for funds on deposit at interest rates of 3 ½ to 4 ½ %. Initially these companies were primarily concerned with housing developments, but when the Caledonian Railway moved the site of its proposed Central Station to the eastern side of Hope Street, the Blythswoodholm Building Company, backed by the Scottish Lands and Buildings Company, took over the original site on the west side for a major hotel and shopping arcade development. In this project Peddie realised some of the ideas in the unbuilt schemes for St Enoch Station in Glasgow and the North British and Caledonian Hotels in Edinburgh, but with Alexander Thomson-based elevations. By 1877 the Scottish Lands and Buildings Company had become overstretched as costs escalated and disposed of its interest to the Scottish Heritable Securities Company. Further capital was raised but in 1878 the City of Glasgow Bank crashed. This provoked a prolonged recession and in 1879 the Caledonian Railway decided to convert its offices into an hotel, bringing about the liquidation of the Blythswood Building Company and of the Scottish Heritable Securities Company in 1882 when a £70,000 bond was called in. Kinnear's Scottish Lands and Buildings Company also went into liquidation, but it was a voluntary one and it somehow managed to remain solvent. Peddie & Kinnear's other property companies fared no better as a result of the recession and the withdrawal of loan capital: calls for capital from companies which no longer had a value were to plague both partners to the end of their lives.
The partners similarly incurred heavy losses in their two large hydropathic developments: Dunblane, where the company was formed in 1874, and Craiglockhart, a by-product of the Craiglockhart Estates Company, formed in 1877. At Callander, where they acted as consultants to the Stirling architect and civil engineer Francis Mackison in 1878-80, they were careful to avoid subscribing any capital. All three hydropathics failed in 1884 and were sold to hoteliers: the only one to survive was Shandon where the capital cost had been kept low by buying the existing mansion by John Thomas Rochead for a fraction of its original cost.
In 1878 the Peddie & Kinnear practice briefly became Peddie, Kinnear & Peddie following the return to the office of Peddie's son John More Dick Peddie (born 1853), who had served a short apprenticeship with his father before seeking experience in the office of George Gilbert Scott and had subsequently returned to his father's firm as assistant in 1875 after a grand tour. After his return the practice's church work took on an English Gothic rather than the continental Romanesque which had characterised his father's. When John More Dick Peddie became a partner the practice was also joined by Peddie's fifth son Walter Lockhart Dick Peddie, born in Edinburgh on 7 November 1865 and educated at Fettes College. He may have been less academically minded than Peddie's other sons: he did not go to Elberfeld and of all Peddie's sons he was the only one not to go to university, signing drawings at the early age of fourteen.
In 1879 Peddie withdrew from the practice at the age of fifty-five, his stated intention being to enter politics, although the real reason was at least as much concerned with repairing his family fortunes and providing for his unmarried sisters and daughters by becoming a fund manager. He did not become a retired Academician, thereby blocking the election of both Kinnear and his son, and retained his membership by exhibiting old projects.
After the elder Peddie's withdrawal from the partnership Kinnear became senior partner and the practice took the title of Kinnear & Peddie. Kinnear initially tended to retain the larger public and commercial commissions: or at least that is what contemporary references seem to suggest in relation to Longmore Hospital and Craiglockhart Hydropathic, the Germanic classicism of which is a simplified continuation of the elder Peddie's Alexander Thomson-inspired work of the 1870s. The more ambitious country houses, particularly Drygrange, also followed well-tried Kinnear formulae but John More Dick Peddie and the younger members of staff must have done much of the detailing which had become more academically neo-Jacobean with Aesthetic Movement influences.
Like every other practice Kinnear & Peddie's was affected by the recession following the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank. But although the banks had lost money in the Donald Smith Peddie frauds which came to light in November 1882, they remained loyal. The Bank of Scotland's George Street branch, designed by J M Dick Peddie in 1883-4, was the finest the practice built, still very much in the tradition of his father's bank and insurance buildings but with subtly updated details. Its style was reproduced in a simplified form for some provincial branches but his relatively few urban buildings of the 1880s tended to be more free Renaissance or Jacobean. For the Caledonian Station, 1890, a number of very French Beaux-Arts schemes were produced, the variety of draughtsmanship suggesting that outside help may have been brought in. Some of the details suggest the hand of George Washington Browne even if the arched forms were reminiscent of the St Enoch Station proposals of thirty-five years earlier. In the smaller domestic commissions 'Old English' half-timbered gables were adopted from the mid-1880s and at Redholme, North Berwick, 1889, with which Browne's name has been linked, 'Queen Anne' in red sandstone rather than red brick.
Kinnear's design role gradually declined after he became Colonel of the Midlothian Coast Artillery Volunteers on 29 June 1884. But as soon as Peddie died he sought admission as FRIBA, his proposers being John Burnet Senior and two eminent Londoners, Professor T Roger Smith and his partner Charles Forster Hayward. He was admitted on 8 June 1891, and in the following year the Royal Scottish Academy elected him associate, an honour which 'at the time considerably astonished him and which it is doubtful if he ever fully appreciated'. He did not live to become an Academician, dying suddenly of heart failure after a normal day at his HQ and in the office on 5 November 1894. The Midlothian Artillery took over and organised one of the largest military funerals seen in Edinburgh. He was buried in Dean Cemetery, not far from the Peddies. Like Peddie he had suffered colossal financial losses and when he died he was probably much less well-off than he had been in 1856. His moveable estate amounted to £19,375 12s 5d but of that £6,710 2s 5d was a bond on his brother John's Kinloch estate which the latter could not easily repay. Except for the properties on Princes Street and the estate of Drum, the properties he had inherited from his grandfather had been sold. Neither of Kinnear's sons became architects, Charles Maxwell Kinnear becoming a tobacco manufacturer in Liverpool and the much younger Norman Boyd Kinnear an ornithologist who ultimately became Director of the British Museum in 1947.