"Freedom and whisky gang thegither -"
Moray Place
We have been lucky over the years in that nearly all of our clients have been wonderful people to work for, none more so than Patrick and Mary Harrison. They were the most patient and positive people during one of our longest running projects.
Moray Place is one of the most prestigious parts of Edinburgh found in the centre of the world renowned Georgian New Town. Most of these grand houses have been subdivided into separate apartments and this apartment was a basement flat which was made up of a former billiard room and a collection of ramshackle kitchen facilities complete with a dumb waiter that had once serviced the main apartments upstairs. The bulk of this property was in fact a flat roofed extension to the rear of the main building accessed by a long corridor filing beneath the tenement itself.
The new extension involved the demolition of most of the rear area and the conversion of the billiard room into a master bedroom.
A new space focused on the spectacular views across the Waters of Leith and Lord Moray's pleasure gardens and then over to the West. A barrel vaulted roof covers the new extension and two rooflights running parallel, one on either side, allows daylight to flood the rooms below. Under the vault the spaces are interconnected and comprise a garden lounge, a dining area, a kitchen and a study tucked under the back of the tenement.
In constructional terms the most challenging part of the job was the near inaccessibility of the property. We took out, in the demolitions between 120 and 200 tons of material including huge iron beams, that even cut into smaller sections measuring just over a metre long, took three or four men to lift. To take all this through the property would have meant negotiating more than a hundred feet of winding corridor and then up a narrow basement stair. The alternative, which we chose, was to take it all through the communal gardens at the back.
A journey of some 500 yds and all of this by physical labour alone since the narrow garden paths didn't allow us any form of mechanical assistance. (neither did the gardener)
In the same way all the new material including the steel substructure had to come in via this route. It was slow arduous work, the original structure which we were demolishing by hand would have defied a crane with a swing weight on the end. The massive iron framework was infilled with a vaulted structure three bricks thick and then successive generations had added layers of concrete tar and felt.
Ultimately with a very determined and able team of men the job was eventually completed in time so that the clients didn't have to spend a third winter in their butt and ben, bought years earlier as a summer retreat for the warmer months and whose principal source of power was a little windmill installed by Patrick himself.
News
Moray Place - RIBA Award - 09/07/2002
Awards
RIBA Award 2002
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