TECHNICOLOR DREAMHOUSE

Bold, beautiful and completely unique, this Edinburgh flat’s decor is a homage to the transformative power of paint

- Catherine Coyle

Sam Buckley is an artist. Not your regular painter-at-an easel type of artist, though; he doesn’t do pencil studies or landscapes or self-portraits. Instead, he uses buildings as his canvas, em blazoning walls and huge spaces with graphics and using colour for maximum impact. He’s a master at taking a decorative art and showing that it can be all about function, too. He blends design with art to create dramatic interior spaces, and nowhere is that more obvious than in his latest residential project, in Edinburgh’s Merchiston.

His client, Brenda Carey, a senior computer games designer at Rockstar Games, had seen what Buckley had done with his own home and was keen for him to look at ways to inject something special into her traditional Victorian flat. “The place had good bones – a previous owner had rewired it and the floors had been redone – but it needed to be freshened up and made more exciting,” recalls Buckley. “Brenda wanted a home that would make people say ‘wow!’ when they saw it.”

The pair began discussing Supergraphics, a favourite book of Buckley’s and one that has helped shape his design ethos. “It was published just after I returned from Milan, where I was doing my masters,” he recalls. “It’s about graphic design for walls, buildings and spaces and celebrates bold design on an outrageous scale.”