STOREY OF OUR LIVES

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...

- Photography Lorenzo Zandri Words Chae Strathie

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.”