Gilmour Road Property, Photos, Contemporary Home, Architect, Design

Richard Murphy House Extension : Gilmour Road

Edinburgh House – Modern Intervention

Gilmour Road Property

Private House

47 Gilmour Road
Date built: 1991
Richard Murphy Architects

Extension for Mr & Mrs Francis

47 gilmour road

Beautiful and sensitive extension – one of Richard Murphy’s best-known (this is the one with the hanging seat).

All the major public rooms of this large Victorian semi-detached villa were at the front. The client’s brief was simple: make the rear of the house as enjoyable as the front and provide one extra room.

What have become familiar trademarks are seen here in condensed form (and perfected after the first extension, Inverleith Row, no. 10 on this list – see ‘North’ below): expressed steels, oversailing roof, contrast of old stone with new materials, western red cedar, intricate balustrading and in/out rooms that animate the house when open.

Richard Murphy, Edinburgh

The existing kitchen to the back was compromised by an add-on utility room, sitting on a plinth which accommodated the fall on the site from front to rear: it was decided that this room should be ‘semi-demolished’, and the plinth excavated to form a study with a new kitchen built above it.

Gilmour Road, Edinburgh House

An expressed external steel structure allows a lead roof to float free of the walls which in turn consist of western red cedar panels ‘offered up’ to the exterior stone work and two ‘disappearing corners’ of glazed doors and windows respectively. From the latter there’s a view of Arthur’s Seat while the former gives access to a balcony and seat hanging from the new structure and a staircase connecting to the garden below.

To compensate for light excluded by the overhanging roof a new roof light joins the extension to the existing building and the former kitchen was converted into a dining room. A garden formed around the idea of a dry pebble river was also part of the same commission.

£45k

Gilmour Road house images / information from Richard Murphy Architects

Richard Murphy

Edinburgh Houses

Edinburgh House designs by Richard Murphy Architects:

Moray Place house

picture from the architect