EMOTIONAL RESCUE

Should you follow your head or your heart when buying a house? For the owners of this Arts & Crafts home in East Lothian, the answer was clear - even if it meant more work, more time and more upheaval

- Chae Strathie

We’ve all been there. You're looking for a new pair of shoes and you like the first pair you see. But then you think you'd better check out some other shoes, just in case. So you go round all the shops, before inevitably ending up back at the first one, getting the shoes you could have bought right at the beginning. That’s what happened to Alasdair and Rhona McHugh... except it wasn't a pair of shoes they fell for, it was Mayfield House, a stunning Arts & Crafts home in the East Lothian town of Haddington.

“It was just after our first little one was born and we came and met the owners of this place,” Alasdair recalls. “We thought we should go and see some other options, and as time passed, they took the house off the market. We knew the owners were living between here and France, so a year later, having seen about a dozen other properties, we put a note through their door, saying, ‘If you ever think about selling again, drop us an email.’ It was around Brexit time, and they got right back to us: ‘Oh yes, we'd like to talk about it,’ they said.”

Alasdair and Rhona had whittled the choice down to two houses by this point - Mayfield and one on the opposite side of the street. They asked award-winning architect Jamie Ross, of Glasgow's Technique Studio, for advice on which had more potential. In his view, it came down to two words: head or heart.

“The other house was 400sq.m and complete, while this one was 321sq.m but needed work - and was on the market for less,” recalls Alasdair. “So, the conversation we had was, do we buy the finished product or do we create something bespoke? Jamie's advice was to go with the other one!”

The architect laughs when reminded about this: “Yes, I remember saying, ‘That one's the sensible choice, and Mayfield is the heart choice.’ It wasn't open in the right places – it was like a rabbit warren. It was big but didn't feel like it.”