The Lighthouse

Sitting near a prominent corner, it looks at once up to the hill and out to the sea, two poles of life on this side of Arthur’s Seat. This one-bedroom studio retains the memory of garages to the street and opens out towards the garden, turning to this South-east elevation to draw in morning sun. On the main floor, kitchen, dining and living places fold around one another, drawing on an existing level-change and making use of ceiling heights and half-walls to mark subtle differences in place. They inhabit a single open-plan volume, lending light and air to an otherwise small plan. An ash spiral stair leads up to a small bedroom with windows on three sides. To the outside, this elevated room holds the corner of the street, whilst inside it gives onto a roof garden which surrounds the secret room. A lean strategy to embodied carbon has seen the building retain existing foundations and walls from the garages and use timber frame, wood fibre insulation and a wet plaster made from lime and crop waste. Materials have been sourced mindful of the landscapes that they come from, hence expanded cork floor insulation and local Douglas-fir and Ash for interior joinery. Together these act to give the rooms a kind acoustic quality, thermal mass and passive humidity control. A new deep-set roof garden provides multiple habitats for plants and pollinators through its variation in soil depths and has been alive with bees and insects throughout its first Summer. Replacing the old asphalt garage roofs, this new garden is conceived as a biodiversity multiplier, bearing witness to the principle that architectural intervention can improve a place for both people and wildlife in the same breath.