12 Jordan Lane

Design Team:

Client: Private client

Architects: Gordon Duffy, Partner Katharina Neff, Architectural Assistant Michael Whitfield, Architectural Assistant

Engineers: Harley Haddow

Builders: Skill Express

Kitchen specialist: 56 North

Short listed for Architecture Scotland Annual 2006

 

The extension to this grade B Listed villa in Morningside was conceived of as having three distinct elements. Rendered walls surmount a timber podium, a zinc clad portal sits atop.

The extension and the podium provide intermediary stages enabling freer visual, as well as physical, access between the house and the much lower level garden. High level gaps between the zinc and the render are glazed, allow the morning and evening sun to enter providing views of nearby trees while visually lightening the building and maintain privacy.

The worktops of the remodelled kitchen continue through secondary openings either side of the main access. The dialogue formed between the kitchen units and the garden room beyond softens the connection between the principal opening and the extension.

The proportional relationship between the three openings and the existing windows was carefully considered to contribute to the aesthetic marriage between old and new. The positioning of the units contributes to the strong, but not didactic, axial relationship that leads the eye from the kitchen through to the garden.