THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE MY HOME
With several award-winning architectural projects under his belt, Richard Murphy took on a site in Edinburgh’s New Town to construct a spectacular home for himself, finds Nichola Hunter
Award-winning architect Richard Murphy takes us on a tour of his unique New Town self-build, and not a single detail is left to chance
What you don’t want to do is finish a house and wake up one morning and have a brilliant idea,’ says awardwinning architect Richard Murphy. Thankfully after five years of living in his own selfbuild there are no regrets.
Before discovering the site of his current home in Edinburgh’s Hart Street, Richard had been designing a house for himself in a close off the Canongate when the land sale fell through. Having completed two mews houses for a client on Calton Hill, which were built for rental, he moved into one of these and started a journey of test driving his own designs.
He had plenty of time to refine his ideas as the road to Hart Street and his own selfbuild was a long and winding one: ‘Alerted by a friend to an already subdivided garden in Edinburgh’s New Town,
I wrote to the owner,’ he explains. ‘That email initiated a ten-year adventure, with planning permission achieved in 2007, just as we plunged into a recession. Construction was delayed with the house eventually completed in Easter 2015.’
When Richard first viewed the site, he was already aware that it was one of a kind. ‘This part of the New Town is rather peculiar, and it doesn’t follow the rules that the rest of the area does. I did some research and discovered that there is a boundary line that goes at an angle across the street and this divided up the former Picardy and Gayfield Estates. They developed at the same time and the tenements should have continued around the corner but they both ground to a halt at the boundary which resulted in four gable ends which were exposed and unaligned. In my view this was a gift from heaven from a planning point of view. There was no precedent, and the site was unique. I had
a bit of a reputation for doing unusual things and being successful with them, so I thought I would try my luck.
‘I set about designing a house and deliberately made it as tall as possible to blank out the unsightly gable wall and to create a book end to that unresolved piece of planning.’
It wasn’t an easy ride to get planning but eventually permission was granted and then the recession hit. ‘I sat on the site for four and a half years and then it took two and a half years to build and I moved in five and a half years ago. When I look back on it now, the four and a half years furlough in the middle was quite good because it allowed me
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to keep refining the drawings. Nothing fundamental, but fiddling around with it and checking things. I wanted to ensure I had tried out every single possible way of doing something before I committed, and I think I’ve done that. There isn’t anything I would change.
‘I know what I’m good at and I allow the people around me to get on with what they’re good at. I worked with a builder who I’ve done lots of projects with. I probably couldn’t have done it with anyone else because there were several ideas we had already tried out on other projects. He’s very good and that was an interesting and fun experience going through the process with him.’
The design is certainly an interesting one with the three-bedroom property taking up four storeys on nine different levels. ‘The internal conversation was about how do you get as much as possible onto a tiny site – 11m x 6m? I was also
I set about making it as tall as possible to blank out the gable wall