5-5A Chalmers Crescent, Edinburgh

5-5A Chalmers Crescent is a Baronial style villa built around 1865, featuring two storeys and a three-storey tower, arranged in an L-shape. The building is constructed from squared and snecked rubble, with stugged ashlar and polished dressings on the east elevation. It has a base course, crowstepped gables, and gabled dormerheads, along with skewputts and chamfered reveals.

On the east elevation, there is a central entrance tower with shouldered and roll-moulded surrounds framing the porch entrance and main door. The entrance features a panelled door and a plate glass fanlight above. Above the porch, there is a blank rectangular tablet and a string course. A single shouldered window is located on the first floor, and the third stage of the tower jetties out with segmental-arch corbelling over the window below. Each face of the tower has shouldered single windows that break the eaves in the dormerheads. The angles are chamfered, and there is a cornice with an attenuated pyramidal roof above, covered in fishscale slates, with lead flashing and a weathervane finial. To the right at ground floor, there is an advanced bipartite window, with a dividing cornice, and above it, an advanced shouldered bipartite window with a dormerhead. The first floor features a canted window in the gabled bay, which is corbelled to square, with a small gablehead window above.

The north elevation has irregular fenestration. The south elevation has three bays, with single windows on the ground and first floors and a bipartite window at the center of the ground floor. Dormerheads break the eaves at the first and second bays, while the third bay features a crowstepped main gable.

The west elevation includes a single-storey triple-gabled service wing with a modern forestair leading to the first floor and irregular fenestration. The villa has a mixture of four-pane and plate glass sash and case windows. The roof is gabled and covered with grey slate, featuring a 19th-century dormer window on the south side, lead flashing, four wallhead stacks, and moulded eaves guttering, with some original rainwater goods still in place.

The interior was not seen in 1990. The property is bordered by a low coped boundary wall along Chalmers Crescent and a high wall along Palmerston Place.