FIVE-STAR ROOM SERVICE

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

- Chae Strathie

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 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 building 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 nonstructural elements to remove the warren of bedrooms and cramped corridors, with both architects excited by what the process revealed: “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.”