23 Blacket Place, Edinburgh

23 Blacket Place in Edinburgh is a pair of distinctive houses designed by Sir James Gowans between 1859 and 1860. The buildings are two stories tall with an attic and basement, featuring a symmetrical four-bay rectangular plan. They are constructed from polished sandstone ashlar with polychromatic banded masonry and stugged rubble sides. Architectural details include a base course, a dividing band course, a bracketed cornice, banded quoins, and a central banded pilaster. The windows are architraved and have aprons at the ground level, with semicircular pediments and carved keystones above the ground and attic windows. The first-floor windows have bracketed cills and cast-iron guards.

The west elevation, which serves as the entrance, has slightly recessed single-storey entrance porches with glazed sides on the north and south. Above the north porch is a glazed conservatory. The doorways feature semicircular pediments with round-arched fanlights. The inner bays at the ground level have Venetian windows, while the outer bays have round-arched single windows. The first floor has single windows, and the attic features round-arched dormers. The basement is regularly fenestrated with decorative iron guards.

The windows throughout include four-pane timber sash and case windows on the ground and first floors, with Venetian windows flanked by two-pane lights. The attic has four-pane and six-pane sash and case windows. The roof is a grey slate mansard style with one mutual and two pairs of wallhead stacks, which are crowstepped, banded, and have bracketed cornices. There is decorative iron brattishing in front of the basement fenestration and along the coping of the wall facing the street.

The boundary walls consist of a coped wall to the street with later railings, as well as a coped mutual boundary wall and gatepier shared with Nos 21 and 27. The interiors were not seen in 1996.