One of Edinburgh’s most unusual houses finally has a refurbished, reconfigured interior worthy of its handsome good looks

This B-listed subdivided mansion in the Barnton area of north-west Edinburgh is something of a unicorn. It was built in the 1930s in the Queen Anne revival style – a style that is fairly common in London and the south of England but highly unusual in Scotland. “A red-brick mansion in Edinburgh is not normal by any stretch,” agrees Tom Armistead of local architects Somner Macdonald.

Owners Kirsty and Tom Dalgleish rejected the property when they first viewed it in 2019, at the start of their search for a more spacious home for their growing family of four young boys and assorted pets. “I think we weren’t sure it was big enough,” recalls Kirsty. “But there was something about it that I really loved. I could see potential. I just didn’t know how far that potential could go.”

At a second viewing, the pair fell for the place properly, and resolved to be the ones to bring a renewed sense of order and purpose to its interior, which had been left jumbled up and lopsided as a result of various alterations post-subdivision in the 1970s. “The layout wasn’t right,” Kirsty remembers. “The kitchen was at the front, whereas we wanted it at the back where the large southfacing garden is. We wanted to do the work but we knew we needed help.”

Enter Somner Macdonald Architects, with Tom Armistead steering the transformation of this unusual Edinburgh abode into something truly extraordinary. The couple were very clear about their brief, Tom recalls. “They wanted a house that was fitting for modern family life,” he says. The challenge, as he saw it, was to go further and “to turn that into something with personality, that is completely bespoke for them.”

The family needed more and better proportioned bedrooms (the mansion now has five in all), plenty of bathrooms (they got four, including two en-suites), a boot room for kicking off muddy wellies, and a big utility room for dealing with the mountains of laundry generated by a family of six. Functionally adapting and improving the home was one thing. But how to make it beautiful in the process? It was all about the thresholds. “Archways were such a strong feature of the property,” explains Tom Armistead. “We loved the scale of them, and the way they provided thresholds within, dividing and closing off spaces.”

The most prominent addition to the mansion is a small but exquisitely formed extension on the western elevation, containing a dining room glazed on two sides, with elevated views down the garden.

Entrances to the extension from the new kitchen in the original part of the mansion are formed of what were previously two tall window apertures. These are thresholds for more than just passing over and through; they are for feeling a sense of transference between the house’s past and future. “The openings between the old and new are lined in warm oak panels, and express the brickwork’s depth and solidity,” says the architect.

A surrounding section of exterior wall became an interior wall. The satisfyingly staccato rhythm of its weathered red bricks is emphasised and celebrated through illumination from above via a thin strip of skylight, as well as through delicate counterbalance with a new wheat-coloured brick wall adjacent.

The new bricks, like the colour of the precast concrete cap that sits over the extension, were selected to evoke the blond sandstone more typical of Edinburgh buildings, and to tie in with the colour of the mortar in the original mansion. “To use a plaster or timber finish here would have seemed apologetic,” believes Tom.

“It was important to match the richness of the existing stone wall. This is a major reason why there are no plastered or painted surfaces in the extension.” He and the team loved the house’s rounded internal archways so much that they decided to add a few new ones.

“We created two pairs of adjacent arches in the main living room that draw you through to the staircase and the family living space.”

This is an excerpt from issue 159 of Homes & Interiors Scotland magazine

Buy your copy here to learn more about this impressive mansion renovation

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