CLICK AND CONNECT

Bold, leftfield designs where you wouldn’t expect to find them, in tight spaces amid venerable listed buildings. Are they out of place? Do they alter the character of the established urban area for better or worse? Are they courageous or ill-conceived?

- Gillian Welsh

BRIEF To create a large open-plan light-filled kitchen that would connect to and make use of a derelict outhouse at the far end of the garden. During planning, the brief extended to include underfloor heating, a ground-floor shower room and a bathroom renewal, as well as landscaping work.

BUDGET Originally £210,000, but this grew along with the scope of the work.

DIMENSIONS 550 sq.ft

BIGGEST CHALLENGES For the architect: to marry modern detailing elegantly to a traditional building, attaching/diverting services in a way that’s visually discreet. For the owners: to live in a building site for two years.

ARCHITECT Alastair MacIntyre, McInnes Gardner Architects

All these questions could be asked about this addition to the back of a converted Victorian townhouse in the west end of Glasgow. And any doubts you might have had about the concept on paper would surely vanish when you saw the reality. As ingenious as it is ambitious, it connects the duplex apartment (ground and garden level) to the formerly derelict outhouse at the end of the enclosed yard. A wall separates the garden from the street, meaning the build is invisible to passers-by. “It’s fairly minimalist – we really didn’t want it to detract from the original building,” says owner Andy Rough, who lives here with his wife Sarah and 11-year-old son Finlay. The family needed more space, particularly for dining and entertaining, but had no desire to up sticks, resolving instead to make the best use of what they had so they could continue living in the area they love.