73 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh

73 Cockburn Street is a building from 1892-3, designed by John MacLachlan, situated in Edinburgh. It is an asymmetrical, four-storey and attic tenement (five storeys to Cockburn Street), built in the Scots Baronial style. The building occupies a corner plot and incorporates a shop (formerly a bank) and a public house on the ground floor. A prominent feature is the canted, octagonal bay at the corner, which corbelled outwards to form a circular turret topped with a ball-finialled “candle-snuffer” roof above the third floor. The building has a single bay facing High Street and nine bays facing Cockburn Street.

The ground floor is faced with cream ashlar stone, while the upper floors are built from squared and snecked rock-cut sandstone with polished dressings. A dentil cornice runs along the building at the third-floor level. Gabletted crowstepped gables and roll-moulded openings are also present.

The corner bay features steps leading to a doorway set within a round-arched surround flanked by blocked, fluted Ionic columns. A decorative corbel and balustraded apron sits below the first-floor window. The second-floor windows have scrolled pediments, and the parapet includes a machicolation with semicircular merlons. Above this is a circular cap-house with segmental-pedimented windows.

The High Street elevation has a gabled bay with tall round-arched windows on the ground floor. A bracketed balcony is situated above the entrance, and a monogrammed cartouche is visible. Above this is a four-storey oriel window, topped by a circular window in the gable and an apex stack with a corbelled chimney breast.

The Cockburn Street elevation is divided into three sections. The left section has a timber-panelled door within a corniced and consoled door piece, featuring a letterbox fanlight and Ionic colonnettes. Three segmental-arched openings are positioned to the right on the ground floor. The upper floors feature predominantly two-light mullioned windows. A corbel table runs along the second floor, and a gabled dormer sits within the attic, with an asymmetrical stack corbelled outwards to the left, and a smaller dormer with a shaped pediment to the outer left. The central section, also gabled, has two round-arched windows on the ground floor and an oriel window corbelled out to the left. A bracketed balcony is located above the entrance. Stone-mullioned, two-light windows are present on the first, second, and third floors, with scrolled pediments above the first-floor windows. A ball-finialled bartizan is positioned to the left at the fourth floor, and a small, stone-mullioned, two-light window with a segmental pediment sits within the gable. The final bay on the right has two round-arched windows on the ground floor and a dormer to the attic with a shaped pediment.

The upper sashes of the windows contain small panes of glass, while the lower sashes are plate glass within timber sash and case windows. The roof is covered with green/grey slates, and the corniced apex and ridge stacks are topped with circular cans.