81 High Street, Hawick

83 High Street in Hawick is a pair of matching three-storey and attic tenements, built around 1878, featuring four bays and originally four shops at the ground floor. The buildings are part of a terrace and have shoulder-arched windows and dormers in the attic. The shopfronts are made of painted ashlar, while the upper sections are constructed from tooled, squared, coursed yellow sandstone with raised, polished ashlar dressings. The rear is built with roughly squared yellow sandstone, also featuring polished ashlar dressings and raised cills.

The shopfronts have plain stall risers and fascias, with surviving cornices at Nos 81 and 85. A cill course and continuous hoodmoulds are present at the first floor, and an eaves course connects the second-floor lintels, rising to a corbelled cornice that is interrupted beneath the dormers at No 85 by raised sections with roundels. There are quoin strips and stop-chamfered margins, with shouldered window architraves at the first floor and basket-arched margins and corbelled cills at the second floor. The front doors are timber-panelled, and No 81 has a corbelled canopy above its tenement door, while the shopfront at No 81 features vertical and horizontal glazing bars.

The buildings have four single-light, flat-roofed wallhead dormers at Nos 81-83 and two bipartite, flat-roofed wallhead dormers at No 85, topped with a mansard roof. The shopfronts have fixed plate glass, curved at the corner windows of No 81, and the upper floors predominantly feature four-pane glazing in timber sash and case windows. The roof is made of grey slate, with ashlar-coped skews and corniced ashlar stacks that have circular buff clay cans.

Inside, there are stone stairs leading to the closes at the lower levels and timber stairs at the top storeys, with decorative cast-iron balustrades and polished timber handrails throughout. The flats predominantly have four-panel timber doors.