The owners of this lower flat were all set to extend outwards to gain the space they needed when they suddenly had the chance to buy the apartment above
Anyone who has ever lived in a flat knows that having upstairs neighbours can sometimes be a bit challenging, let’s say, thanks to a soundtrack of thuds, bangs, footsteps, pounding music and blaring TVs. There is one solution to this perennial problem, of course: become your own upstairs neighbour. That’s what Dixie Mirowski and Ralf Farthing did. Well, sort of.
The couple, who own Edinburgh store Catalog Interiors, had bought a lower conversion in a two-storey Victorian sandstone house at auction, and were well on the way to extending into the garden, with the help of Jamie Anderson and Ben MacFarlane of Pend Architects. But then an unexpected opportunity arose that would force them to rewrite those plans – in a very good way. “When Covid hit, the students who were living upstairs moved out, which meant the landlord had no income,” Ralf recalls. “So, I went to see him, and we came up with a deal for us to buy the flat.”
The design for reconfiguring the original downstairs layout and creating a living room and two bedrooms in a large new extension had to be swiftly shelved – something that came with sacrifices. “We were meant to have a tsubo-niwa – a Japanese-style semi-internal courtyard,” Dixie explains. “But that had to go. I really wanted a tsubo-niwa!”
For the architects, who already had planning permission for their initial design, it was back to the drawing board. “We enjoyed the challenge,” says Jamie. “It fell together quite naturally because we’d already explored a lot of what Dixie and Ralf were looking for. It became a more traditional house with the three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, which opened up the ground floor for the public spaces.”
The end result (after a year of construction work during which Dixie, Ralf and their ten-year-old daughter Georgia lived on site) is a wonderfully bright, open and spacious two-storey home with a flow that makes absolute sense for the family’s lifestyle. The key to why it works so well is that entertaining, something Dixie and Ralf love to do, has been built in to every aspect of the downstairs level. Dixie explains the thinking behind it, recalling how they put entertaining near the top of their list of ‘wants’ before they even moved into the flat. “We wrote down what we wanted, and one of the main things was to have friends over. We couldn’t do that in any of our previous flats, which were so small that if you squeezed six people in it would be tight. We were really keen to be able to invite friends and family over and to entertain.”
From the moment guests arrive at the front door, the new layout draws the eye in through the home. From the glazed door you can see straight down through the hall and dining area to the living room – in a beautiful, curved extension – and out through massive sliding doors to the garden T he decision to move the kitchen to the large bay-windowed room at the front of the house was a turning point in reshaping the layout of the lower level. “The house is on an east-west axis,” says Jamie. “We put the kitchen in the more traditional bay window setting on the east side, so you get the morning sun coming in. Then you carry on through the intermediate space and the dining hall and then retreat into the living space. It’s about threading those public areas together.”
The two flats had originally been one house, so now that the staircase was being opened up to ‘unconvert’ the conversion, there was suddenly much more space to play with, allowing the couple to achieve their dream of a home fit for entertaining “Having the kitchen at the front is unusual on our street,” Ralf acknowledges, “but the new plan means we can spread out nicely when we’re socialising. There’s a connectivity between the front and the back of the house.” The large, airy kitchen (with cabinet doors by Naked Kitchens and Pianca) is the first public room you arrive at, with the dining area in what was originally a bedroom, but which has now been opened up to the entrance hall at one end and the living area in the new extension beyond.
This is an excerpt from issue 161 of Homes & Interiors Scotland. Want to read more about this two storey home? Buy your issue here.
Should you follow your head or your heart when buying a house? For the owners of this Arts & Crafts home in East Lothian, the answer was clear…
The owners of this Arts & Crafts home in East Lothian followed their hearts
