1 Howdenhall Road, Edinburgh

1 Howdenhall Road, Edinburgh

A house and offices designed by William Kininmonth and Basil Unwin Spence in 1934, with additions in 1936. The buildings are executed in a modernised traditional idiom with some Mediterranean references.

The complex employs cement render, originally cream but now white-painted, with revealed cream sandstone ashlar dressings and distinctive blue-grey pantiled roofs (retained at the offices but lost at the house). The house is set low into the slope of the ground behind two symmetrical office blocks, which in turn stand behind screen walls. This arrangement creates the visual impression of large roof expanses and minimal wall to the west (road frontage), contrasting with a full two storeys exposed to the east (garden).

The house itself is a two-storey building with a simple plan: a single bright room to the right and two rooms to the left of a central entrance hall. The pitched roof carries modern replacement tiles dating to circa 1980. End stacks exist, flanked by concrete-bay end additions of 1936 in similar style, originally flat-roofed, with piended roofs clasping the gables of the main house added circa 1980.

The west or entrance elevation is three-bay. A central entrance features a simple cream ashlar doorpiece with a tiled top and a recessed, glazed inner door with 15 square panes in a grid of thick astragals, matching the pattern at the front gate. Single windows with 8 lying panes flank the entrance. On the first floor, a central window has been altered to a single pane but originally held 6 lying panes; it is flanked by two horizontal windows, each with 2 mullions and 9 lying panes. Single-storey additions flank the main mass.

The east or garden elevation is three-bay, with single bays at the later additions flanking. The centre contains two-leaf glazed doors with 6 lying panes vertically placed to each leaf, surmounted by a long V-plan stair window with 7 square panes either side of a central mullion. Ground-floor flanking windows hold 12 lying panes, 4 panes deep. First-floor windows have been altered to match the ground floor but originally held 9 panes only 3 panes deep; cills were dropped to improve daylight. The left-hand addition has a single window, whilst the right-hand addition has two-leaf glazed doors from the kitchen, though originally in 1936 it held a window.

All windows originally featured shutters, as at the offices, but these have since been removed.

The interior contains a staircase with original balusters and a broad pine handrail at the inner angle, supplemented by an aluminium handrail fixed to the wall at right. Original fitted cupboards survive in the hall. The dining room, positioned to the right or south of the entrance on the ground floor, features a yellow and grey tiled fireplace with a detached mantel shelf.

The house is linked to the offices by archways. These are harled, with slightly pointed arches outlined by contrasting edge-on grey pantiles arranged as voussoirs to create an effect of waves; a single row of tiles tops the wall head.

The two office blocks are identical and mirror one another, flanking the gate to the road and centred behind the house entrance. They are narrow in plan. Deep snecked and squared bull-faced sandstone rubble forms the plinths, above which white-painted harl continues. The glazing pattern mirrors that of the house, with vertically disposed lying panes. Original blue-grey pantiles and shutters are retained. Each block is single-storey, with a slightly lower projecting garage bay at its centre: the right-hand block (No. 5) features a modern garage door, whilst the left-hand block (No. 1) retains two-leaf boarded and glazed original garage doors. Inner bays at the main blocks on the west elevations include prism oriels.

The rear or east elevations have canted windows projecting at the outer bays. An entrance exists in the south block at the inner bay. Single tiny ridge stacks stand over the main blocks towards their centres.

The screen wall to the west facing the road is of earlier, 19th-century date, built of rubble with dressed copes. A 1934 square-gridded low wooden gate in the style of Spence's doors elsewhere provides access.