An architectural makeover has allowed this fine Playfair property to throw off its dingy hotel past and re-emerge as the elegant home it was always meant to be

Needing more bedrooms is often the main reason for buying a new home – but it seems you can have too much of a good thing. That, unsurprisingly, was the case at this Playfair property, a former hotel in the eastern fringes of Edinburgh’s New Town, which sits in the lower three storeys of a Grade-A listed Georgian tenement built in 1822 by William Henry Playfair.

The team at Helen Lucas Architects found themselves tasked with de-bedrooming and renovating the Playfair property for its new owners, Lee and her husband, reimagining it to create a spacious, light-filled home. The project was led by the practice’s Issey Fraser and Rosalind Love, with a brief of balancing the property’s historical importance with the comforts of modern living and environmental considerations.

As soon as the two architects walked through the doors for the first time, they could see they had their work cut out – but, like Lee, they could also sense the property’s astonishing potential. “It was so dark and dingy – the first time I went down to the basement I was there for about three minutes before I wanted to get out!” recalls Issey. “It takes a particular type of client to look at a property like that and think, ‘I could do something with this’.

But Lee told us she felt there was something really special here.” Rosalind, the practice’s conservation-accredited architect, and Issey immediately set about stripping out the internal non-structural elements to remove the warren of bedrooms and cramped corridors, with both architects excited by what the process revealed in this Playfair property: “Once those walls came out, we were like, ‘wow, look at those proportions!’ We took back and took back until we reached the original elements,” Issey recalls. “At one point we stripped off some old wallpaper, and underneath it was this beautiful, Victorian wallpaper. It was amazing.”

Rosalind was equally enthused: “We were thrilled to see that the original ceiling rose in the main room was pretty much perfect. It just needed some decoration.”

Other period features were uncovered, including flagstones, timber lintels and a pencheck (cantilevered) stair, and many of these would be recycled and reused during the renovation. But first, the tricky process of planning permission had to be navigated. “That was a big headache,” says Issey. “It took ages to get it through.”

Wrangles over elements such as creating a doorway between the living room and kitchen were solved when the architects discovered a historical opening that had been blocked up precisely in the spot they were looking at. Windows were also an issue in this Playfair property, as Rosalind recalls. “We were putting in fineo glass – a vacuum-insulated glass – and we had to prove we could make that work within the existing astragal profiles. Getting that through was a big part of ensuring the air-source heat pump would work well. In fact, there were objections to the heat pump itself.”

Eventually the planning obstacles were overcome, and work could begin in earnest. Installing the air-source heat pump in an old property is something Issey is particularly proud of. “There’s a perception that because a Playfair property like this one is leaky, a heat pump could never work in it. But it was designed to be heated by a stove or a fire, and the thick stone walls keep that heat in, so it maintains a low-level temperature, which is exactly what an air-source heat pump does.

“I’ve found it so interesting – the lessons you can learn from how people did things 200 years ago. We all think we’re so cutting-edge these days, but they did it first!”

This is an excerpt from issue 163 of Homes & Interiors Scotland. Enjoyed this read about the Playfair property? Buy your copy here.

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