The prime of life

Beginning a fresh chapter can mean finding a different way to live. And these owners certainly found that at a remarkable new house in Aberdeen

- Malcolm Jack

It was a feat of inspired architectural improvisation that gave the Arbor House - a finalist in this year's Scottish Design Awards - its defining feature: a covered outdoor walkway, supported on one side by the former west wall of a crumbling old cottage that once stood on the site, and on the other by a concrete colonnade.

The walkway screens the calmly contemporary eco home and its leafy surrounds from the busy road that runs past it, while at the same time acting as a "mental airlock', as architect Andrew Brown characterises it, where a process of psychological decompression can begin on approach to the front door. "That thing of 'mentally unloading' when you get home is quite nice," he says.

Working with the remains of a historic building hadn't been in the thoughts of owners Russel Davies and Wendy Wilkie in 2017 when they first began hunting for a plot near Aberdeen. But in order to get everything they wanted out of the project, they had to let pragmatism reign. The broad plan was to build a strikingly modern suburban home where they might enjoy winding down towards retirement after raising six kids and leading busy lives and careers, in Russel's case as a chief executive in the oil and gas industry.

Each had children from a previous relationship, he says, "so when Wendy and I married, we had to buy a house with many bedrooms, because of all the kids. It was a big converted steading in the middle of the countryside north of Aberdeen. It was a fantastic location, but there were downsides: you couldn't do anything without jumping in the car. We were like a full-time taxi service. We started thinking - wouldn't it be nice to live somewhere else, but just for us, not designed for the kids? Because they're all grown up now and getting on with their own lives."